The Punch Escrow

The good news is if you’re reading this, then you’re officially in charge of figuring out what to do next. I’m off the hook. Consider the baton passed. Hooray for you. The problem for me is trying to figure out how much you know, because you’re in the future and I’m in the past. Maybe it’s a good idea for us to start with the past past, like stuff that happened before I was born that is relevant to my present, which is still your past, but now possibly relevant to your present.

Do they still teach you guys about The da Vinci Exhibition at school? Maybe that’s a good place to start. After the solar storm of April 15, 2301 botched the Mona Lisa’s teleportation from Rome to New York, da Vinci’s masterpiece was gone forever. A globally cherished artifact destroyed, along with hundreds of people unfortunate enough to be on, or in the path of, motor-powered vehicles in the vicinity of Italy at the time.

A solar storm is what it sounds like: A generic term for increased activity in the Sun. In this case, a massive solar flare, followed by something called a colossal coronal mass ejection, which is a fancy way of saying “gargantuan electromagnetic solar shitstorm.”

A solar flare is initiated by the sudden release of energy stored in the Sun’s corona, causing the Sun’s plasma to heat up to tens of millions of degrees, accelerating and spewing out all sorts of radiation, resulting in a solar eruption. One way to think about it is to imagine an Earth-sized zit popping on the Sun’s forehead. Granted that’s a pretty gross visual, but now it’s in your head and out of mine.

Anyway, in this particular solar storm, the energy from the corona eruption also caused an equally devastating coronal mass ejection, which is a much slower-moving, billion-ton cloud of plasma that found its way to Italy at a very unfortunate moment. A more powerful electromagnetic pulse than mankind could ever hope to tame, the solar energetic particles hit the Earth with such force they ionized the sky, creating a vast cloud of energetic electrons that bounced around inside the atmosphere destroying electronics and fusing conductive wires everywhere.

Back then, when they teleported something, atomic sections of the object in transport were destroyed, or cleared, concurrently with their confirmed intact arrival at their destination. When the teleportation process was complete, the place of origin was officially deemed clear of the teleported object, and the item at the destination was henceforth considered to be the original.

By the time the enterprising geniuses with their lab rats, number crunchers, and lawyers realized there was a mistake in their teleportation protocol, nothing could be done to save the Mona Lisa. Rows of atoms perfectly replicating centuries old masterstrokes suddenly unravelled into nothing, at the same moment the source painting dissolved into a cloud of worthless gray quantum foam. It wasn’t for a lack of redundancies, it’s just that black swans don’t play by the rules, and this one was a particularly petulant pen.