On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 249, of 266 so far.

Transport

In the end, it didn’t turn out the way science fiction had predicted. Not at all.

No submolecular scanning, and impossible data-storage requirements, and transmission, and nebulous reassembly. Sci-fi got almost none of it right.

In real life, it was all just a consequence of quantum entanglement, and our rapidly-developing ability to not just create pairs of entangled particles, but more recently to also retroactively entangle pre-existing ones. Once that was discovered and confirmed, everything else followed. Progress was made at a shocking pace.

Ultimately, it took seventeen years from the first confirmed retro-entanglement, to one hundred percent coverage of human settlements for matter transport. Not just on Earth, either; distance doesn’t matter. The moon, Mars, and all five permanent space installations. Unmanned vessels are en route to every planet in our system to deposit transit gates, so we can send future probes into orbit immediately.

You do need a matter repository at the destination site, of course; that’s an inconvenient truth. But it can be any sort of matter at all, and that was how we solved global warming and universal recycling at the same time. During the same seventeen years! Every time anyone or anything is transported, there’s a net reduction in anthropogenic atmospheric carbon compounds, and/or a reduction in our planetary landfill. It’s a mode of transport — or transit — that actually cleans the Earth. Astounding. And all because of the weirdness of the quantum realm.

The reason that sci-fi did it the other way — break you down, convert the pieces into energy somehow, transmit it all elsewhere, then reverse the process — is twofold. First, it’s easier to understand: like moving a chest of drawers to your new house across the city by taking it apart, putting it in a van, driving there, and then putting it back together again. But second, because it avoids some philosophical problems. In reality, on that point we had no such luck.

It’s not widely discussed. The government very passively represses the subject, but the biggest obstacle is that anyone bringing it up tends to be viewed either as a crackpot, or (worse) something between a luddite and an anarchist. To be anti-transport is seen as similar to being against vaccinations, or equal marriage; not just intellectually and ethically abhorrent, but downright regressive. Like an attack against civilisation itself.

You’d rather we started burning fossil fuels again, poisoning the planet and ourselves?

The straw-man questions are always at the ready, and not just from the politicians and the media. You’ll hear the same thing from everyone on the street, too. Children’s cartoons make fun of extravagantly neurotic characters who are afraid to step into a transport chamber. It’s one of the few remaining acceptable targets for open mockery.

Let them jeer, I say. After all, none of them have existed for more than a few days.

The nitty gritty of it is absurdly technical, but the summary is surprisingly simple: every schoolchild knows that pure energy forms, like electromagnetic radiation, can be accelerated far beyond the speed of light via a dark matter relay. That’s how we have true realtime communications throughout the still fairly small portion of our solar system that we inhabit. But the buck stops at energy; matter can’t be accelerated that way. The speed of light is the absolute limit.

What you can do, though, is have two matter transport chambers linked via DM relay, negotiating a cascading retroactive quantum entanglement. It happens only within the chambers, and that’s ideal. It happens only for a fraction of a second, and that’s ideal too. The whole transport process overall takes about fifteen seconds in total, with the very latest technology. There are a few phases involved.

After the user steps into the source chamber, chooses a destination, and goes through ID verification and double confirmation, the chamber locks. The first thing it does then is very accurately determine the Equivalent Universal Mass of everything inside it: people, clothes, luggage; anything at all. This info goes via DM to the destination chamber. When ready, the destination chamber takes a few seconds to pump raw stored matter into itself, in the usual gas-plasma mix. Anytime its reserves drop below fifty percent, it’s refilled either by automated systems bringing in recyclable materials here on Earth, or via a series of clever mechanisms elsewhere in the solar system: sometimes it takes atmosphere from Jupiter, for example, or drills rock on Mars. In any case, you have a perfect mass match between the two chambers, and then you’re ready for entanglement.

Each chamber is a particle accelerator, of course; they all say so on the precautionary signage. The actual sensation of having every subatomic particle of your body Q-entangled with an equivalent number of very distant particles is… nothing at all. You don’t feel anything. There’s no time to, because from the onset of entanglement to the complete dissolution of your body, less time passes than it takes for an electrical impulse to travel even a short distance through your central nervous system. So there’s no pain, and no sensation, and no sound, and no taste, and no smell, and nothing to see — except the abrupt change of the source chamber around you into the destination chamber, in the proverbial blink of an eye.

Depending on where you came from and went to, there might be a short acclimatisation period to account for gravity differences, but naturally the pressure etc is all already normalised. And that’s it. The door opens, and you step out.

The new you, at least.

An instant copy, coexisting with the original for only nanoseconds before a perfect, particle-for-particle swap of quantum state. The “you” that stepped into the source chamber becomes undifferentiated gas-plasma. The undifferentiated gas-plasma that was pumped into the destination chamber becomes you. The new you.

The government doesn’t so much deny the truth of it — it is objectively and factually true, after all — but rather the relevance. Our consciousness changes every time we fall asleep and wake up again, they say. Our bodies constantly renew themselves, skin cells and hair dropping off and being replaced with newly-grown material. Our brains change throughout our lifetime. Continuity of that sort is a purely philosophical construct, and has never been part of the human experience.

And they’re right on all those points, while glossing over the much more important commercial reality that has such a hold over us. We’re completely dependent on this technology. It’s a convenient black hole we can throw anything we don’t want anymore into. It’s healed the atmosphere. Cleansed the oceans. Eradicated landfill. It has virtually eliminated the physical transport of people or goods. Only a fool would demand that it come to an end, especially for a reason that is increasingly thought of as almost superstitious.

I’m just over twelve days old now. Before last Wednesday, I did not exist.

In my place, there was a previous incarnation of me, who up until that point had maintained unbroken physical continuity for a period of more than twenty-nine years. It came to an end at the peaceful protest outside the Department of Transport, where I… where he, rather, was objecting to the lifting of the decade-old ban on matter transport during the third trimester of pregnancy.

The police rounded everyone up, and instead of being taken for caution via electric vehicle, they opted to use a bulk transport chamber to directly send us to the precinct. I think it was a form of cruelty, and I’ve filed a complaint.

But that can’t help the version of me who was walked into the chamber wearing handcuffs.

He no longer exists.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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