Coming out the other end of a teleporter is a sensation that Saul still hasn't gotten used to.

  It reminds him of when he'd gotten his wisdom teeth out as a teenager, the first time he'd ever been anesthetized. He remembers the nurse standing over him, counting to three: 1... 2... and then he's supine on some cold wooden bench in another room, groggy but awake, and absolutely no time seems to have passed at all.

  Teleportation is like that, except you're fully awake and unbothered practically the whole time. No one is sticking IVs into you when you enter, and you don't feel like a ton of bricks when you leave. You simply prepare your trip, get yourself into the right place at the right time, and step into the pod. The pod closes, it's pitch black, and for one brief moment you can't feel anything — and then the pod opens again, and you're on the other side of the world.

  It's that split second of nothingness that everybody always wonders about. What is happening to you in that moment? What is happening to You — to You, the capital-Y You — in that moment? So many words have been written on the subject, so many pages wasted trying to explain it in a satisfying way. Questions about the self that precede the invention of teleportation, precede even the computers that can do it, all struggling to make sense of this astounding technology.

  But for Saul — who ports almost every day, and has for years now — those questions are not important. In the beginning, when people asked him what it was like, he would tell them: it's like falling asleep, and then instantly waking up.

  Nothing more exciting than that.

  Sometimes, when he crossed the threshold, he would forget what he was thinking, if he was thinking about anything. But it wasn't like all of his brain activity stopped. He would come out the other end with his mind alert, his heart pounding, his lungs expanding and contracting, his stomach churning or grumbling or whatever it happened to be up to that day.

  Today, his stomach is doing somersaults. And a little instantaneous cross-country journey would not stop those somersaults.

  He has just stepped out of the pod into one of the O-stations near his apartment. His phone's just confirmed his arrival, and he's resisting the lazy urge to have a Huang bring him the four blocks back to his bed. He's not running on very much sleep right now.

  No, he thinks. I want to work. It's a bit of a walk from this station to his office, but he needs the exercise. It will give him time to think.

  All his thoughts become irrelevant as soon as he steps off the elevator, because Visa Chaudhary accosts him.

  "Oh, there you are!" he says, gingerly holding his tablet in one hand, with a boba tea tucked under the same arm. "You're here early. That guy Amos from Zeus has been trying to reach you all morning. He's pretty pissed."

  "Yeah," Saul smears his hand across his face, a little groggy. "I'm here." Truthfully he'd been trying to avoid having to talk to Amos — but it was probably going to go better than the situation he'd just left. "What the hell is it now?"

  "Same old story," says Visa. "They're still freaking out about Sunday's shipments."

  "Well, they shouldn't have been shipping high-voltage cargo on a Sunday," said Saul. "And during scheduled downtime—"

  "I know, I know, don't you think they've heard that speech a hundred times? Anyway, they want to see if Restore had any backups to our backups. I told them I'd bump it up to you and see what you could do."

  Saul stares at the sugary concoction that Visa is carrying under his armpit. The plastic film across the top remains intact.

  "I'll call them on one condition," he points, "you give me that tea in your arm."

  "Whaaaaaat? No, I paid good money for this." He grabs the drink with his free hand, the cup slightly crumpled. "These pearls are actually from Kyoto. Go get your coffee."

  "You're nuts," Saul teases. "You can make tapioca pearls anywhere. Anyway, I'm tired, and I don't want to look at coffee right now. Not after the morning I've had." He rubs his hand across his beard. "I'd rather pump some strawberry melon corn syrup into my veins."

  Visa stands firm. "No can do. I'm due in Ottawa in 25 minutes. Gotta work out these regs. I need this boba right now like I need the blood in my veins."

  "Fair enough," says Saul. "Hey, give the PM a spanking for me."

  Visa grins as wide as a man can grin. "Come on, Saul," he said. "You know he prefers the whip."

  Saul laughs heartily.

  Fucking Canada. They were pushing the boundaries of what Restore could be responsible for. Sure, a universal backup system seemed like a reasonable, humanistic idea in theory. But their government refused to accept the massive increase in logistics that would go into such a task. Server data and raw metamatter alone would cost them billions more than they were allowing for. The fact that the existing data storage was as low as it was was something of a minor miracle, only possible thanks to Calvin and his team's relentless testing.

  It would be one thing if Canada was only pushing this project for their citizens. But, bizarrely, they were also letting lobbying groups get a word in. People were one thing, but cargo was something else. The clusterfuck of state, national, and international regulation was massive and unrelenting. And it was always full of ugly surprises. Saul was lucky that Ocular could stay on top of it, that they could spend the time and money that they did.

  Katerina's lucky too.

  Saul watches Visa hop into the elevator, and the doors slide shut. He stares at the closed chrome doors for a while, pondering his distorted reflection in its surface.

  It's quiet today in the office. The cubicles are packed within the maze that makes up Saul's floor, but the endless walkways and moderately high ceilings absorb a lot of sound. Saul can still hear the chatter of employees throughout the office. Employees who, without the technology that they so diligently supported, would probably be working from home. But Ocular's company culture worked best with constant face-to-face interactions. Besides, with a free unlimited Porto pass you got as an employee, there was virtually no cost to port right to the office, right onto the ground floor of any building on campus. There were probably people here from every time zone.

  Ocular was a strange corporation. Saul has always thought so. It started in one man's basement almost 60 years ago, and is now the largest tech company in the world, its global influence surpassing even that of the United States government. To think it once used to be so reliant on the DoD for contracts and R&D funding, and now it is practically bossing the U.S. military around in its efforts to expand itself, using the Army to do its dirty work in sourcing raw materials, seeking locations for O-stations, and seizing energy resources on behalf of Calvin.

  A part of Saul has always found this to be a bit tasteless of them to do.

  And it creates problems like the one he has now, where he has to explain to some other large defense contractor why their shipment arrived damaged in a mid-sized cargo port, entirely due to their own incompetence.

  "Amos, I don't think you understand," says Saul for the fourteenth time. "There are certain restrictions on transported material going through cargo stations. These restrictions are a black box, which I've repeatedly explained to Meredith. If I go out to Major Engineering and ask them to tell me what, exactly, about the content made it throw errors, they couldn't do it. I could give them ten days as a whole team to work on it, and only then they'd only be able to give you an educated guess."

  The short-tempered Amos, visibly sweating on the monitor on Saul's office wall, once again starts to bitch about how unfair it is.

  "Yes, I realize that it's not fair," replies Saul. "Nothing that Calvin does is fair. His decisions are beyond all our comprehension. And that's a good thing," he enunciates, stabbing the air with his pointer finger. "Because if he gets one tiny thing wrong, the whole system falls apart. And then it won't be just Zeus who suffers."

  Saul leans back in his office chair and stretches his jaw from side to side.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "However, I should remind you that the rules for cargo are clearly laid out for you in your shipping contract. Let me pull it up." He already has it pulled up in a side window, so it takes him no time to show Amos something that Amos should have already read three times over. "There is a restriction on certain times of the day, on certain days of the week. These are high-traffic times in our network, not just for cargo but for the public network in particular. They are not separated, you're on the same grid as the global population.

  "Now, I'm not sure how you managed to even get a shipment into the pod when you did, but from what I can tell, it was recognized as four separate packets by the computer. This is an extremely common occurrence for large private shipments, and the possibility for this is explicitly laid out in the ToS agreement.

  "Now, because of the split, these packets arrive and are reconfigured at certain times. There is a reasonable attempt at dividing the packets and timing their arrival, but it is not under our control. And — with this in mind — you decided to ship a large contiguous volume of a volatile substance."

  Amos berated Saul again at the mention of a "volatile substance".

  "Yes, yes, I know, however, there are many many more factors to consider than just matter and metamatter. And I've spelled those factors out to you and your team many times over. I also want to point out that porting is more popular than ever, and Ocular is aggressively expanding the capabilities of our network, but we can only keep up with so much demand."

  Unspoken assumption that Saul leaves out: the demand increase in the private sector increases by 50% for every 10% increase in public demand. And public demand, the transportation of people and their very finely-balanced existences, is always, always a priority.

  Saul sees that Bryan Berman has invited himself into his office, and is leaning against the open doorframe. There's a grin on his face like he's just pranked Saul and is waiting for Saul to notice. Saul uses this opportunity to shake Amos off the call within the next thirty seconds.

  "Hey Bryan," he says after ending the call. He rubs his cheeks with his hands to clear the angry monologuing from his face. "What's up?"

  "Hi," says Bryan, still grinning. "What's got you in a mood?"

  Saul plops his hands on his desk. "It's the fucking Zeus case still. It's been a boil on my butt all week so far. No signs of easing up."

  "Yeah, they seem pretty new to this game," says Bryan. "That's what happens when your company grows as fast as they do, though. Takes work to scale properly, and they just didn't put that work in." He takes off his glasses and scratches his nose. "We should honestly just give up on them and let insurance sort it out."

  Bryan is one of Saul's closest companions in Restore. They're often trading information about each other's cases, gossiping about office politics, and assisting each other with tasks and theories. In a complex department like Restore, which is constantly kicking other departments in their most sensitive areas, constant communication and a strong team culture is a necessity.

  "Oh God." Saul rubs his hands across his face again. "You would fucking love it in insurance, Bryan. Fifteen hundred accountants who don't even have the engineering skills to plug in a toaster? There's a reason we're a smaller, tighter team over here. We actually have people who know what the hell they're talking about." He turns to look at the monitor where Amos had been yelling at him. "Plus, we're in Zeus's contract, so we deal with their incompetence whether we like it or not."

  Bryan was a bit of a goofball, but he could always be relied upon to bring the often-too-serious Saul back to the land of the sane. He could practically smell Saul's frustrations wafting past his office door. This had definitely been one of those times.

  "Just wanted to let you know they scheduled the Restore for the case you picked up this morning," says Bryan. "You know, your friend in sales. Atherton."

  Saul looks up. "Katerina? Yeah. That was fast."

  "Yeah, well, I'll bet Calvin wants her back pretty bad. One of our own, y'know?"

  Saul nodded. "Yeah, good point. She is a... prominent individual. I'll bet she's talking with Calvin daily."

  Bryan shrugs, moving further into the room, making his way towards a small side table with the intention of leaning against it. "I mean... aren't we all talking to him daily."

  "You know what I mean."

  Bryan shakes his head and completes his casual seat/lean on the table. "No, I don't."

  Saul spins a bit in his chair, kicking his feet up on his desk, matching Bryan's casualness.

  "Well, I think that most of us at Ocular are using Calvin like a computer," he says. "We're extracting data from him, running calculations, trying to get human-readable information out of him."

  Saul picks up a pen and starts playing with it absent-mindedly. "But I've talked to Katerina about this, and she says she doesn't see Calvin that way. I mean, why would she need to? Maybe she asks him to spin her up a spreadsheet or two every so often. But from what I can tell, she sees him as just another coworker. She asks him for advice, news, she gossips about stuff in the office, she shoots the shit with him."

  "She kind of brings the humanity out of him," says Bryan.

  "Yeah, that's... yeah, I guess that's a good way of putting it. I think with the kind of work she does she needs a different kind of data than the rest of us. Calvin is perfectly capable of that too. I mean," he laughs. "His ancestors are just LLMs, after all."

  "Don't let him hear you say that," says Bryan with a grin.

  Saul snorts. "I'm sure he's heard it all before. I mean, the history of AI is rife with people not understanding it, not accepting it, being terrified of it — all because people didn't know what the hell they were for, or what they were capable of. And now — look around us, Bryan — they are capable of so much." He raises his voice in a mock shout. "There, Calvin, I'm flattering you, happy?"

  "Anyway," says Bryan, "I thought you might want to oversee Katerina's Restoration, so I took up your meeting on Thursday so you can supervise it."

  "Oh," says Saul, a bit surprised. "Thanks?"

  "Yeah, let me handle Zeus for a bit," says Bryan. "You don't need to be trapped in that bullshit cycle. They pay us enough to deal with junior managers, but they don't have a good enough relationship with us to waste your time. Hell, if they keep this up, I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to kick it over to Viktor."

  "I've considered that," says Saul. "But I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now."

  Bryan groans. "You know, Saul, your problem is you're too fucking nice. Zeus are being jerks. They need to know the rules if they want to play the game. And that game —" he pulls his phone out of his pocket "— is changing. Look at this."

  Bryan puts his phone on Saul's desk. There's an article open on it. "This went up on the Ray while you were out."

  The Ray was the company's virtual platform for public discussions and announcements. News articles, high-level internal memos, office politics, research, and even the occasional unprompted message from Calvin all made their way onto the Ray. It could be a mess of communication, and good managers knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Bryan was one of those guys who stayed glued to the Ray for almost all of his waking hours, diligently picking for wheat.

  Saul leans over and sees a wall of text. It looks like a scientific article. He squints his eyes to peer through the jargon. The engineer in his is admittedly still not enthused at reading technical language, but he can skim the abstract quickly enough while Bryan hovers over him.

  His eyes go wide when he sees a certain number.

  "A thirty percent decrease?"

  Bryan nods, grinning with full teeth.

  "For organic cargo? That's insane."

  "That's what I thought too. But you know, during the slump from the South China boycott, Calvin had a lot of time on his hands. A lot of those O-stations were not being used, and... you know how he likes to... tinker."

  "Isn't that what they were boycotting?" says Saul. "The tinkering?"

  "Yeah," Bryan says drily. "That and they didn't want the p-zombies crossing the border."

  Saul laughs heartily, bracing himself against the desk.

  "Borders schmorders," says Saul. "They were trying to regulate the damned electricity out of those transports. Like, chemical analysis is already hard enough. But if you're really trying to crack down on certain objects, you'd be better off actually spending your time and money on old-school customs agents. They might as well have been trying to keep abstract concepts from coming into the country, as far as Calvin is concerned."

  "Yeah," says Bryan. "No words allowed."

  "Yeah, take the word individual out of the brain of anyone who passes through there."

  "Yeah, don't let liberty across the border," says Bryan.

  "Calvin, I'm going to need a full functional analysis on the superstructure of the idea of liberty."

  Bryan jokingly affects an android, making beeping noises and knifing the air awkwardly with flat palms. "This calculation will take time. Please return in 7 million years." He spins around. "Forty-two."

  Saul snorts, picking up Bryan's phone and pushing it into his face. "Get the fuck out of my office, Bryan, before you make any more antiquated literary references."

  Bryan grabs his phone and turns to leave. "If you don't appreciate my presence, I'll go find someone who does. And I sent you a time slot for the Restoration. Local team is informed."

  "Thanks, Bryan," Saul calls after him, as Bryan disappears back into the hallway.

  Saul pulls up his schedule for the rest of the day. He's got a few meetings here and there, nothing out of the ordinary. He sees the slot for Katerina, a little gray panel with dashed lines around the edges.

  He stares at it for a bit. Memories of his morning meeting flash into his mind. John's haggard face, sweating from the caffeine, his mind probably going a million miles an hour through outer space, while his body twitches and shuffles across the carpet like a mental patient.

  What was he thinking? thinks Saul. "What if I don't want her Restored?" What could possibly motivate a man to ask that about his own wife? Not to mention saying that a man whose duty it is to bring her back. Oh, Katerina, Katerina, I pray for you.

  Saul actually thinks about praying, there in his office, but there is no one left to pray to. Humanity has finally bested God at His own game. We had won 50 years ago, in that nondescript laboratory in Maryland, where a lowly little bacterium was scanned, dismantled piece by piece, stored in a quantum memory buffer, and perfectly reorganized instantly 6 inches away. And it was still alive — it still moved, ate, excreted, reproduced — it was still alive.

  And now, here's a hardworking team who brings people back to life. He is literally going to bring Katerina back to life. From the dead. Back to life.

  What if she doesn't come back?

  For a brief moment, Saul is able to suddenly grasp what John was afraid of. It makes sense to be as scared as he is. Even a man who has ported thousands of times — who has seen thousands of perfectly executed Restorations — can be scared to the very bone of teleportation and its staggering implications. All it takes is one mistake — like what happened with Zeus — and you're gone. Or you don't come back the same. You step out, somehow... somehow different.

  These thoughts slip away from Saul, just as quickly as they'd arrived. And Saul is left staring at the precise time of day when Calvin has decreed Katerina will return, shaken but unharmed, from her lost vacation.

  He clicks Accept.