Human-Lite: a story of two halves by GF Willmetts (fiction).
No man is an island until you count how many atoms they contain and find that they divide you from other people. A flash scan equivalent to nuclear magnetic resonance to capture everything in a moment fills the biggest computer’s multi-quad-quad-quad hard drives with not much of it left over. Ergo, we can’t teleport a human being. It even struggles with the smallest insect. There’s just too many atoms to count, even before we get to reconstruction elsewhere. It is the greatest transport teleport device ever, and we can barely use it to send sugar cubes.
The discovery of teleportation came about by recognising a connection between two basics of science. The biggie was The Conservation of Matter and Energy’. Nothing can be created or destroyed with a new adjustment; it can be moved by entanglement to keep within the law, provided something is instantly destroyed and all the data transferred into a computer data and entanglement makes it appear elsewhere. Essentially, we had found teleportation. This doesn’t mean it can’t decay normally, so you can still die, and if you teleported said matter, it would still be dead, but if you disassemble someone into a digital file, then entanglement will recreate it somewhere else. We could do it easily with a few atoms and molecules and even a tiny block, but the translation into computer memory and hard drives had limits when our objective was to teleport an organic being. We had run into a big stumbling block.
We needed a solution to the problem of how to disassemble that much matter. Some idiots suggested comparing it to the process of turning a BMP into a JPG picture file. Then we thought a little, and perhaps he wasn’t being such an idiot. The smaller JPG file came out by identifying similar blocks and then replacing them with a number-one set of data for each. For non-organic objects, that would work, but for organic objects, it wouldn’t because there were too many dissimilar blocks. It wasn’t though we couldn’t transfer small blocks, and now we could up the scale to bigger blocks of the same material. Organics was just too complicated to disassemble quickly enough. With the amount of circuitry, even CPUs would be a tough call.
A better solution was what we could take out of a body. For commercial purposes, we couldn’t defoliate and strip off dead skin from a paying customer. Who would want to appear as naked as a baby? But it did start some thinking. What could we take out of the body that wouldn’t be missed? We’re not talking organ removal. If we go commercial with it, people will expect to get through in one piece, or why bother going the quick route? The commercial aspect had to be thought of from the start because the research funding involved would one day have to be paid back.
If we couldn’t take anything from our size, what about anything smaller? Mapping atoms was hard enough. The instrumentation could record waves or particles, and in the instance where we flash-memoried, we could get mostly particles. Waves would have less mass, but the attempts we made couldn’t get them back to particles, and the mass was a mess. We were doing that with entanglement before we aimed for our ultimate objective of large objects, and even this took a lot of computer memory and drives.
The biggest obstacles were the atom contents. You could see on the screens the density of the atom core and where the electron shells were, but each atom had pitted other elementary particles, and they were being recorded. One of the newer graduates lamented that it was a shame that those particles couldn’t be removed. That turned several heads and sparked a heated debate on how it could be achieved.
I mean, we were recording any object and any information available, so it picked everything. The scan could be told to ignore some things. The problem was that these same sub-atomic particles were also waves, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle made it hard enough to scan already. The obvious answer then was to ignore them completely, apart from Higgs bosom. We had their signatures on record so the mapping could go past them. A bonus was that it made the recording faster and resulted in a smaller file to transfer. At least it didn’t fill the world’s hard drives. We weren’t totally stupid. If we hadn’t found the Higgs boson particle, we wouldn’t be able to keep the structure of the atom, so that had to stay.
We would have to work up in size before even thinking of organics. If you want to get technical, Blocks of metal with regular atomic matrixes with no impurities but nothing explosive. You wouldn’t want a block of sodium igniting on arrival in an oxygen environment. Carbon. Then iron. We kept away from the transuranic elements for a similar reason. It was too dense and volatile and couldn’t be entangled. Atomic mass is based on the weight of the nucleus because the weight of electrons and other sub-atomic particles is negligible. The recorded information took up space, not weight. There didn’t seem to be much difference, which kept the chemists busy making compounds to see if there was any difference. Nothing they could see, even in blind tests, so we progressed to compounds to teleport. Although water and common salt were made of two volatile elements, if they were recorded in the same way, then they should come out as compounds after transfer.
Getting around the entanglement was a bit difficult. Would it accept cleaned atoms and molecules? Matter needed something like it to reappear, and the atoms would be clean of it. The bigger the object, and organics, being more complicated, went further afield in entanglement, looking for suitable masses at the destination. It is not a problem when working really small. One of the scientists said it was probably about having somewhere with the equivalent amount of matter to transpose. Another reason to reduce the amount of matter teleported. We had a transport system but no idea where our destination might be. The ultimate mystery tour, assuming we can get back afterwards, so we had to confine it to Earth before going further afield and hope it was a liveable environment.
We still don’t really understand how entanglement works, even though we’re using it for teleportation. The actions of matter in one place are duplicated elsewhere. Would cleaning an atom of wastage be duplicated elsewhere? We have a lot of bright sparks becoming ever more bold in making observations, suggesting that the wastage might actually be the result of extra-terrestrial teleportation experiments that went wrong. It did suggest we create an equal volume of clean atomic matter so an entanglement would be on Earth and not have our subject appear elsewhere in the universe. Not that we wouldn’t want to travel, but we needed to see if it worked. Of course, having clean matter back on Earth could mean we could reverse the entanglement. It’s also feasible that anything sent would appear around such nuclear debris, which might explain why extra-terrestrial teleportation experiments went wrong simply because they doubled the debris. That was quickly argued down because that would have happened when we were sending smaller amounts and we had no explosions. Practical versus theory, and the former won. Even so, nuclear wastage had to come from somewhere, but it was so widespread that it had to come from somewhere. We would need clean matter elsewhere and a cleaning process to work on it. If there were extraterrestrials out there, would they have realised the same problem and had some clean matter deposits for distance transits?
However, having a mass of cleaned matter on Earth gave us an area of automatic entanglement, so we could select where it went. Creating an entanglement field on Earth simply means feeding in enough compositional elements similar into it. Then it was all a matter of scaling up. Having clean atoms upped the ante, but it also indicated that we were the only ones currently doing it. If we wanted to go off-planet, we would do it randomly but not know where it would appear. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be enough to work. The scientists said they could sort that out for anything further.
We made a copy of the object, and entanglement produced a copy elsewhere with the same amount of mass, and because there couldn’t be two exact copies in the universe, the former vanished. The process was easier with less mass, but the first process meant it had to be washed first and resurrected before distance was added to the equation.
The real trick with entanglement was identifying an atomic structure within our proximity. Easy with atoms, a lot more difficult with bigger objects simply because where could we find the same mass elsewhere? This is where the teleportation device came into its own. When we disassembled the object data into the computer, entanglement forced it out in an entanglement of similar matter so it wouldn’t be destroyed. That gave us the necessary control. With a smaller file now, it wouldn’t be a total duplicate but close enough to make it practical. To do it somewhere else, you would need an assembly point built. Now that we could reduce the file size, we could build those on the Moon and Mars before moving to the outer moons of Jupiter and Saturn, mindful of the radiation. The real breakthrough is whether we could find an extra-terrestrial version that could take our matrix and work the same way. We had a receiving point made, not used specifically for that purpose, and broadcast in the hope that someone out there would note and try us.
Another of our bright sparks examined the 115 unused sub-atomic particles and wondered why they were identical, and maybe the entanglement had failed in some way and someone’s atoms were literally spread across the galaxy, if not the universe. With metaphors from graphic files, this could also be the equivalent of a fly hitting a car windscreen. We were looking at alien failures without realising it.
We weren’t stupid when it came to organics. We started with tardigrades. They could survive anywhere and anything, so why not teleport? We sent a few so they could be examined right down to the atomic level. Would they appear clear of other sub-atomic particles or pick them up at the receiver station. Would they pick them up later? All sorts of tests short of killing them. They were celebrity tardigrades. The first organic teleporters. Besides, we wanted to see how long they lived, not died. If there was a malfunction, they would be dead. Would we dissect a human just to see if they were OK? Technically, any organic transferred would have been briefly dead. We could do enough non-invasive examinations without a termination and use biopsy samples. That would also keep the animal rights people off our backs, too.
Even so, we needed to work up the line through the various species and use an insect, and side-step arachnids. A flea would be hard to do an autopsy on, so we chose America’s favourite non-pet, the cockroach. A pregnant one at that, so we can check the offspring eggs could still be laid and bloom.
From then on, it was a matter of size and how much information could be stored for teleportation. In the meantime, we had to look for a human volunteer or more. It would be a Neil Armstrong moment and be in the records forever, even for a short teleport across the country. Even if it were across the world, it wouldn’t be as significant. Anyone sent off-world and not likely to come back might seem heroic, but the media would lose track once the numbers grew.
There were some things we had to be aware of. We couldn’t use a twin simply because we would be accused of doing a magician’s trick. Health was irrelevant, as whatever was teleported would be the same as what was sent. Even so, who wanted the first volunteer to drop dead a short time later? Hardly convincing. At least it would refine the shortlist. We also had to be careful about anyone with a political agenda or an egotist. We would need someone who would be media-ready to describe their experience. I mean, we’re effectively killing them by turning them digital and then making them alive elsewhere.
Then the media caused problems. Weren’t we satisfied with our own product to send one of our own people? As much as any of the key scientists would volunteer, if anything went wrong, we need them on hand. As chairperson of the company, without being asked, I volunteered to go first. If we couldn’t have faith in our own products, then what kind of business would we be in? That and a unanimous vote by the board. Better me than them on the first human teleport. Thanks, friends and bastards. I bet they’re lining up to replace me as chairman if it fails, not realising my successor would also be expected to become the experiment if I didn’t appear intact.
The reduction in scans meant I could at least wear simple clothing. I wouldn’t have to show everything to the people watching. A bit ghoulish watching me apparently die by being absorbed into a computer digital file and then pop up by entanglement somewhere else that we had under control.
I had seen enough of the other animal subjects to know the process. Once the scan was complete, I would be inside the computer and projected on the entanglement curve. I had no idea that my smaller atomic mass, which the wavelengths of the inferior sub-atomic particles supported, could shrink me or harm my brain.
Was I scared? Who wouldn’t be? But it was our chief product. We had to show it was working if we were to keep our funding or go bankrupt and let some other company take the lead. Is that enough of an incentive for me to go? I can bullshit PR later about doing it for all of mankind.
I stood in the chamber while all the cameras watched. We needed the public, or at least those wanting to watch. It wouldn’t last long. I had to be flashed into the computer memory as quickly as possible so I would arrive in one piece at the other end’s entanglement across the world.
One of the techs suggested I keep my eyes open. Not so much for being brave, but to be able to tell the media what I saw. The change would appear in front of another sign, ‘Part B’, where someone had scrawled across the bottom, ‘You made it!’ in purple ink.
In a flash, I was gone. What I thought was instantaneous had me seeing other places before I saw our sign. I made it. I looked down and felt myself. All parts are here. People would expect a genital check even if they didn’t see anything. Even a bruise on my arm from a tiny tracker insert was still there. I gave a curt bow to the cameras. I was the first teleported man by teleportation entanglement. Without the other elementary particles, I was probably the first cleanest man at the atomic level, and I didn’t feel any different. I recited the decimal Pi to myself. If I were brain-damaged, I doubt if that would be possible. We’ll gloss over the fact that I wasn’t quite the same without those particles, but a 99.9% transfer was going to be as close as we could get.
Then there were the physical tests to confirm everything that would be going into the science journals. We had to show we were in control of our experiments. The psychology was a bit different, more so as I described the different places I’d seen before finally arriving. That led to a lot of discussion. Was I delusional? Was it a side effect of the process, or, as one bright spark suggested, maybe I had entangled in other places that had similar states of matter? It didn’t explain why I didn’t stay there and prove the experiment was a failure. They were moving away from me being delusional.
Could I have multiple duplicates scattered across the universe, and would it have an effect on anyone else teleported? Would it reduce the number of places others would appear, or would my duplicates be reconfigured into them? One of the bright sparks said that goes against entanglement. There could only be one of me, even if we did a little cheating with the sub-atomic particle removal. The universe was just checking to see if there were any other places. If we could figure out a way to stop at any of these, we would have the means to really go travelling, and could he volunteer when we sorted that out?
More debate: maybe these places weren’t perfect entanglements but were trying me out there before my final destination. Clean matter was the key. Another bright spark did tend to spoil it, suggesting that maybe duplicates of me weren’t perfect and we only assumed entanglement was to one place and the imperfect ones might still be out there. Maybe there were copies of me all over the universe, and I only saw a few of them. Well, these bright sparks’s ideas weren’t always perfect. I wasn’t sure whether to praise or fire this spark; I just made my apologies and went outside to look at the night sky.
It was once said that there’s a planet for everyone who’s ever lived. This tends to confirm this, although I doubt if most people would want to live in solitary. If she was right, then there were or might be imperfect copies of me on different planets, and we’d never know. Would they be wondering if the experiment had failed or if they had gotten a full grasp of what entanglement really meant? Not only teleportation but existing all over the universe. If they did exist, would they be thinking the same thing? As far as I was concerned, I was the only one and the cleanest human alive. Entanglement said that.
end
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