Some people thought printers would collapse the market value of things like expensive liquor, fancy cheese, and truffles—but corporations picked up the slack. Actually, as far back as the twentieth century, companies have been patenting recipes, like the aforementioned Coke, and KFC spice blends. Replication actually proved to be a very effective way of weeding out forgeries. Could you replicate a burger that was very similar to a Big Mac? Sure. You could even jailbreak your printer, buy a Big Mac, and then replicate it for your friends—but it wouldn’t be the same—the copy wouldn’t be “signed” by McDonald’s.
We humans place a lot of stock in originality—our culture has always focused on “the real thing” having true tangible value, and with molecular signatures, it has become nearly impossible to make illegitimate replications of anything patented. Vive l’original! And anyway, each printer has an origin signature, so even if someone hacked a burger into seeming like a Big Mac by engineering something called a “signature collision,” they would also need to somehow spoof the origin of that burger to be from the Golden Arches HQ. So even if you replicated something with the legitimate McDonald’s key, the receiving printer would still flag the duplicate as fake and you’d get in trouble. Granted, I’m not sure how much trouble someone would get into for breaking the cipher and replicating a Big Mac, but it’s a slippery slope from Big Macs to, say, gold bars—which is actually why certain things can’t be printed but pretty much anything can be teleported.19
It was so obvious once Moti explained it. Teleportation and printing: one and the same. Corina and Taraval had told me a truth I never wanted to know: the only difference between replication and teleportation is that the first allowed for multiple instances of the same object, and the latter didn’t.
Teleporting living things was much trickier than inanimate objects, however, owing to the previously mentioned fidget problem—living things have a tendency to move. Some very smart people figured out that this issue could be solved by calculating the future, rather than present, state of qubits.20
Twenty-six years after it became technically possible, sometime in 2127, human teleportation was legalized in the United States. Even so, there was no small amount of controversy—all owing to the soul. Many religious leaders issued various herems, encyclicals, decrees, and fatwas against any who would partake in or facilitate teleportation, declaring it an anathema. The most vocal of these was a zealot picketer named Roberto Shila. He unified the disparate protestors under a singular, devout, antiteleportation agenda. They declared the place one goes during teleportation Gehinnom, and themselves Gehinnomites.
Ultimately, the question of human teleportation’s legality came to be tested in a class-action suit brought on by one Joanna Shila, the daughter of the Gehinnomite founder. She sued International Transport for the deaths of all sentient beings who would be teleported. After bouncing around in lower federal courts, the case finally reached the Supreme Court. The legal question before the court boiled down to the Theseus paradox.
Given:
? Jane Doe (JD1) steps into the foyer of teleport chamber A (at the origin)
? Jane Doe (JD2) is teleported to the vestibule of teleport chamber B (at the destin)
Is Jane Doe (JD2) the same person as Jane Doe (JD1)?
Entered into evidence were thousands of tests on other living things before we put humans through the ringer, and each study reached the same conclusion: the Jane Doe (JD2) who showed up on the other side was the exact same person, physically, mentally, and emotionally, as Jane Doe (JD1) at the point of origin. Even her comms followed her to the destination.
The only nonbiblical evidence submitted by the plaintiffs that had anything to do with the actual process of teleportation was the aforementioned weight loss that occurred every time a sentient being teleported. This, you’ll remember, was only a few grams and made no discernible change in the teleported subject, so was ruled to be “packet loss.”
In a 5–4 ruling with some strident dissents, the Supreme Court held for International Transport, but with a caveat: teleportation was fine for sentient beings, but printing them whole was a crime against humanity. Once the decision propagated to the masses and was accepted into the global zeitgeist, only the Levant and the Gehinnomites remained steadfast in their opposition to teleportation.
After the case was decided, International Transport was cleared to teleport anyone and everyone. Of course, they left out the part where TCs weren’t porting anybody anywhere; they were merely printing them in one place and clearing them in the other.
Got it? Replication was a technical marvel, the centuries-in-the-making fruit of man’s scientific ingenuity. Whereas teleportation was a marketing marvel, the glorious paragon of mankind’s unlimited appetite for obfuscated convenience.
Therefore, intoned Moti, if IT replicated the ship of Theseus, then the replicated vessel would be a copy, but if they teleported it, then it would still be the original ship. Does it technically solve for the Theseus paradox? Well, since the paradox itself is just a matter of human perception, then it’s not really a paradox—it’s a conundrum, which means that as long as the ruling majority agrees that the vessel that came out of the TC is the real ship of Theseus, then it is.
There are some other interesting nuances. One of them is that teleportation is exponentially more expensive than replication—mostly because of insurance. Once you destroy an original, it’s really gone. Its unique signature goes poof, since the rule is there can only be one of anything that gets teleported. If you googled stories about the early days of teleportation, you’d find plenty of hilarious and depressing anecdotes about things that went awry. Sometimes things would get destroyed prior to successful teleportation; other times they’d be teleported and fall off the teleporter rig. Thus, some invaluable assets such as the aforementioned priceless painting, as well as other precious artifacts, were inadvertently sacrificed as collateral damage in humanity’s quest for a shorter commute. All of that happened a long time before we started teleporting people, mind. Before the Punch Escrow.
I’m guessing if you asked anyone from IT about the moral implications, they would likely extol humanity’s well-documented historical grapples with new transportation technologies. When railroads were first introduced, some people thought the speed would be so intense, it would cause their organs to shoot out of their rectums. But folks still got on board. Whether via land, sea, air, or ether, the desire for more efficient transport has always trumped philosophical worries.
“So,” finished Moti, having gone through several more cigarettes during his long-ass lecture, “since the Isleworth Mona Lisa is now the ‘real’ Mona Lisa, and a Big Mac you eat is a real Big Mac, and teleportation and replication are the same, it follows that the Joel Byram in Costa Rica is now the ‘real’ Joel Byram. And you, Yoel, are no one.”
Whether it was due to his confirmation of my nonexistence, my exhaustion catching up with me, or some other reason, my eyes rolled into the back of my head. I slipped from the plastic chair, cracking my head on the rock-hard floor and slipping into unconsciousness for the third time that day.