Excerpt: Space Oddity Chapter Three

Moving right along with Space Oddity this month (yes, this is my monster deadline, if you were curious) and a brief note on transporters. I'm pretty proud of this one, honestly, and it was super fun to write. (PS: yes, the chapters are all still Eurovision song titles! I considered going with lyrics this time, but titles are fair game always and lyrics can get dicey so on we go. I have like nine pages of amazing titles in my research file!)

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3: The One Who Stays and the One Who Leaves

Even the fully-automated luxury pansexual space neoliberal future has its little disappointments. The 98-pound weakling that was the human conception of physics did indeed get well and truly shoved in its locker with its underpants pulled up over its head. But it still did the homework.

Transporters, for example, are not, and never will be, a thing.

Not because they didn’t invent it. They always invent it. If the famous Klavar vegan chef Kasutu Indica found time to invented the lettuce-soother, a device used to calm and appease all those heaps of distressed, smashed, blistered, crushed, clabbered, roasted, and otherwise profoundly injured produce in her kitchen, then there was never any chance something as massively useful as teleportation wouldn’t violently hook up with the maladjusted laboratory intern of its dreams someday.

It just couldn’t make it past focus group testing.

Not because it’s not possible to disassemble an organic being to his, her, or otherwise, constiuent atoms, fax them across the inky void, and reassemble them on the other side. It very much is possible. And not because doing so technically kills the original person and reassembles a clone or a golem, depending on how you like your metaphysical toast buttered. It absolutely does that. Still better than flying economy. And not because teleportation would make it very difficult for screenwriters and novelists everywhere to create narrative tension and end chase scenes forever. No one cares. Writers are an invasive species. If you don’t believe it, decorate a small corner of your home with small tables, chairs, ferns, cafe lighting, pastries, and a pleasantly burbling stimulant/depressant dispenser, and within a week, you’ll be overrun with bespectacled vermin nervously asking where they can find a power point and not paying for anything.

No, the trouble with teleportation is that it ruins damn near everything.

Galactic history ebbs and flows like denim waistlines. Empires come and go. But virtually every species, sooner or later, throws something like a teleporter against the wall of the universe to see if it sticks. The wall then violently explodes and everyone has to attend a lot of early-morning meetings whose agendas consist of:

1: Oh god what have we done

2: Undo it, undo it!

3: Our descendants will definitely try to un-undo it, so

4: How do you punish children before they’re born?

In fact, the early post-singularity technological clown car usually ends up in a white-knuckle race to see who will be the first to shove a trusting dog into a matter-disintegrator and hope for the best. If your local phylum can collect anything remotely dog-like on the other end, it’s trivially easy to rule the universe. Chuck a handful of cheeky little bombs down the science chute and quicker than you can say beam me up, Scotty, every government you know has a cello-wrapped gift basket of doomsday devices delivered to their door in thirty minutes or less. You get a bomb! You get a bomb! And you get a bomb! And if you don’t want another one to materialize in your planetary core, kindly remand any and all valuable resources, personnel, and trendy food items to the following address, care of your new overlords, please and thank you.

The ancient Alunizar, unsurprisingly to anyone who has ever met an Alunizar, pulled the trigger on this one like a fairy-floss riddled 8-year-old laughing maniacally as they spray jets of water into a clown’s mouth at the colonization carnival. To this day, the Alunizar word for “transporter” translates to a short but super fun war.

But the good times never last. Once one kid has the season’s hot new toy, everyone has to have one, and the resulting mess means no more playdates for anybody. Military use of teleportation devices call down the banhammer faster than a middle-aged suburban dad on an anonymous message board.

But surely one can use them nicely. Travel about, shorten the commute, ship goods that absolutely positively have to be there instantaneously, make long-distance friendships, romances, and stop walking everywhere like sad Victorian ghosts of a time long gone.

Unfortunately, it is a truth universally acknowledged that any single person or object in the possession of a matter transporter must, eventually, somehow, going in, coming out, or along the way, explode.

That’s fine for bombs, exploding is their entire thing. But the simple act of putting an organic being, no matter how annoying they are, into a transporter device is considered crime against all sentient life on every world with two lawyers, a gavel, and a wig to rub together.

It all comes down to maths. Maths is just a massive clobbering buzzkill. The hall monitor of the universe. Oh, please, oh please Mr. Maths, couldn’t I have a lovely cup of cellular immortality? No, you can have detention.

And maths declared war on science fiction long ago.

Suppose you’re a peppy little go-getter who wants to scoot their boots from Incubation Nation to New Phage City on the Voorpret homeworld of Fenek. First, don’t do that. The Voorpret are a viral species in constant search of new host bodies. You’d be infected with Gvami from accounting before you can say this motivational kitten poster would look smashing in my cubicle. But if you must step onto a teleportation disc in one Fenekrian hemisphere, you’d better do it at speed, because the conservation of momentum hates fun. Everything is moving at a hundred thousand kilometers per hour all the time. It never stops. Planets don’t get tired. Stars don’t get stitches in their sides and reconsider the wisdom of going so hard at cardio at their age. So if you don’t want to end up smeared across half a time zone, you’ll have to exit the moving matter-beam booking it at three-quarters of a kilometer per second to compensate for the rotation of Fenek. At cruising altitude, since Incubation Nation shakes its pestilent groove thing at an elevation of six hundred and seventy one meters, and New Phage City bides its time at sea level. Going the other way? You are now a subway car sizzling through the magma layer. And what will you find when you land?

Most likely, a very interesting death.

Re-materializing into a mass of plain old unassuming air will pump you full of fizzy-lifting embolisms. If it the displacement doesn’t just go off like a firecracker in a bin. And may your personal deities help you if a pollen spore drifts by while you’re still dematerializing. Or a bee. Or a bit of moss with a water bear lounging on it. They’re part of you now, and they have opinions. Any and all debris your molecules passed through on the way has a fair chance of getting sucked into the you-beam, so once you’re decanted, you may find yourself full of mountain.

You will also be on fire.

Or frozen solid.

Could go either way.

If you think the conservation of momentum is a wet blanket, wait till you meet the conservation of energy. Move one electron up or down in its orbit around the atom and heat is lost or gained, and you’re about to mightily piss off the entire electron homeowners’ association.

Now, in the unlikely event of anyone actually surviving all this, maths is gonna give you a couple more smacks across the chops before you can return to your class. See, the light that surrounded you as you dematerialized had just enough time to cross the diameter of your eye before you didn’t have eyes anymore. And you passed through a lot of light very quickly on your way to the hopping underground zombie rave scene in New Phage City. The photons touched the particles of your retina and rods and cones and lenses, but couldn’t find the service entrance. So as soon as you have eyeballs again, all those photons are going to dumptruck themselves into your brainpan out of order, upside-down, and deeply confused.

Regrettably, you may also arrive before New Phage City was founded. Or after it crumbled to dust. Time just thumbs a rude gesture and gives up around the speed of light, and teleportation goes much, much faster than that.

So, to sum up: you can stand on that teleporter pad as cheerful, well-dressed, and well-rested as you like. (Although standing is not recommended. Bones are such divas. Child’s pose is your friend.) You’ll still come out the other end hurtling through the sky or barreling underground through the lazy lava river, technically and legally half-water-bear, engulfed in flames, blood exploding, wildly hallunicating into unrefundable insanity, in the past or the future, whichever one had a booking available.

Can none of this be helped by compensators, dampeners, buffers, or a subscription app designed by a Silicon Valley bro someone accidentally fed after midnight? Of course.

Then you have only to consider that, if a person can be deconstructed into a pattern and reconstructed elsewhere, nothing at all prevents them, or other interested parties, from reconstructing multiple totally viable and legislatively indistinguishable copies throughout civilization. Long after your death.

And that you will lose a tiny bit of your matter to the conversion process every time, rendering heavy users approximately the size of an action figure by the time they qualify for senior discounts.

And how you personally feel about trusting the reconstitution of your every (almost) precious atom to the same companies that can’t keep the wifi on if it rains too hard.

And that it’s just plain rude. Transporters are end of privacy, private property, and manners. The birth of a true crime renaissance, since doors are now adorably quaint, locks are meaningless, guest lists are a joke, and your ex can beam a copy of themselves into your shower any time they like, with zero repercussions for the original when you blugeon them to death using a volumizing shampoo bottle.

The first rule of teleportation is: No. Just no.

In fact, it may be the single worst and most destructive technology ever imagined by otherwise sentient beings. Apart from social media.

The preceding is all so universally true that Goguenar Gorecannon wrote a rule about it in her sequel to the bestselling children’s book, Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts, Some Unkillable Addendums for Adults Who Didn’t Listen to Me the First Time.

The Thirty-Fifth Unkillable Addendum states: You can’t have everything. For example, teleportaiton is stupid and nobody is going to do it, not because it’s stupid, that never stopped anyone, but because it is one of the few things in the universe whose stupidity is so powerful that the second you decide what the hell, it slaps you across the face, so you stop. If love were like that, we’d all be happier. But it isn’t, so feel free to beam yourself up into that rock immediately.

In the end, every species was forced to come round to the facts of these murder elevators and voluntarily loaded all their pads, booths, capsules, handheld mobile transmitters, barns, and vestibules onto a small uninhabited planet provided by the borderline apologetic Alunizar, sealed its orbit with vapor-mines, washed their hands of the whole sordid business and named it Madrugada as a warning for all the generations to come.

In Old Alunizar, Madrugada, very loosely translated, means: fuck around and find out.