Star Trek: Picard

Arbitrary said:

An excerpt from This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don't Touch it" by David Wong

I stared out the window and said, “Do you ever get scared, Dr. Tennet?”

“Of course, but you know these sessions aren’t about me—”

“And besides, in your world, everything has some harmless explanation, right? It’s always bees. Even this thing with Franky. Your job will be, what, to go up to a bank of microphones and assure everybody that it’s all bees?”

“You feel like I was being dismissive of your fears. I apologize if so.”

“So does anything scare you, doctor? Anything irrational?”

“Of course. Here, I’ll volunteer my most embarrassing example. I feel like I owe it to you, to make up for the bee story. Are you a fan of science fiction?”

“I don’t know. My girlfriend is.”

“All right, but you know Star Trek, and ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? How they can teleport people around?”

“Yeah. The transporters.”

“Do you know how they work?”

“Just … special effects. CGI or whatever they used.”

“No, I mean within the universe of the show. They work by breaking down your molecules, zapping you over a beam, and putting you back together on the other end.”

“Sure.”

“That is what scares me. I can’t watch it. I find it too disturbing.”

I shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, think about it. Your body is just made of a few different types of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. So this transporter machine, there is no reason in the world to break down all of those atoms and then send those specific atoms thousands of miles away. One oxygen atom is the same as another, so what it does is send the blueprint for your body across the beam. Then it reassembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby. So if there is carbon and hydrogen at the planet you’re beaming down to, it’ll just put you together out of what it has on hand, because you get the exact same result.”

“Sure."

“So it’s more like sending a fax than mailing a letter. Only the transporter is a fax machine that shreds the original. Your original body, along with your brain, gets vaporized. Which means what comes out the other end isn’t you. It’s an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead, his atoms floating freely around the interior of the ship. Only within the universe of the show, nobody knows this.

“Meanwhile, you are dead. Dead for eternity. All of your memories and emotions and personality end, right there, on that platform, forever. Your wife and children and friends will never see you again. What they will see is this unnatural photocopy of you that emerged from the other end. And in fact, since transporter technology is used routinely, all of the people you see on that ship are copies of copies of copies of long-dead, vaporized crew members. And no one ever figures it out. They all continue to blithely step into this machine that kills one hundred percent of the people who use it, but nobody realizes it because each time, it spits out a perfect replacement for the victim at the other end.”

I stared at him.

“Why did you tell me that?”

He shrugged. “You asked.”

His face showed nothing. I thought of the Asian guy, casually disappearing into the magic burrito door, walking out somewhere else. And in that moment I almost asked Tennet what he knew, and who he was.

I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything.

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