Geek & Sundry, an imprint of Inkshares, markets The Punch Escrow as hard science fiction and it does not disappoint. When outrageous corporate, pseudo-religious, and secret agent villains catch wind of this dual existence, Byram suddenly becomes remarkable for the worst reasons. What she doesn’t know until later is that Byram survived-wholly intact-in New York, and this new man she fabricated is a clone. Instead, Byram’s wife, already in Costa Rica, panics and forces the teleportation center to reconstruct him. The bomber, who likens herself to the first fictional female pope, Joan Anglicus, should have killed him. A suicide bomber spectacularly disrupts this attempt by blowing up the teleportation center where Byram attempts to travel. Infatuated with 1980s pop culture-despite the book’s time of roughly 167 years after the beginning of that iconic decade-he’s also a jerk, and generally oblivious to his abrasiveness.Īs a last-ditch effort to be less passive in his marriage, Byram agrees to a Costa Rican vacation with his wife. He works from home where he “salts” (tests) Artificially Intelligent Digital Entities, or AIDEs, attempting to create a more realistic façade of sentience. He’s married to a brilliant scientist who works at a top-secret teleportation corporation and who also performs all the heavy lifting in their marriage. How does one form an identity, a claim of existence? Thomas Mann declared, “No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.” This is certainly true when Joel Byram is accidentally cloned and forced to confront his other self in The Punch Escrow.īyram, the narrator, and the first of the two Joels, lives an unremarkable life before his fateful replication.

The punch escrow