In a perfect synchronous orbit around the greenish brown planet called “This Is My Planet, So Keep Your Mitts Off It!”, two bodiless beings calmly watched as hundreds of bearded humanoids that could only be described as “dwarves” marched, ran, burrowed, paddled, bicycled, rode, skied, and in one case, teleported towards the location of their drop pod’s designated impact site.
That WAS teleportation, wasn’t it?
Negative. Destruction and recreation of matter from one location to another did not occur.
Oh come on. They clearly moved from one place to another in the blink of an eye.
Negative. Time elapsed during transport was 4.3 seconds. One human eye blink is on average 0.3 seconds.
You pedantic piece of… Well, if they didn’t teleport, what did they do?
Insufficient information to properly answer question.
Best guess.
The normally quick to answer computer was forced to search, cross-reference, and collate its vast archive of knowledge in order to respond to the question. After a full second of hard work, it finally responded:
43% Probability: Transportation via Morris–Thorne wormhole.
Time passed in the space ship.
…Say what?
43% Probability: Transportation via Morris–Thorne wormhole.
No, I heard you the first time. Wormhole? As in a tube connected between two black holes?
Affirmative, that is the layman’s description for an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
Well, there were certainly two holes, and they were black, but I don’t think there was a whole lot of gravity or radiation there.
Affirmative. Gravity and radiation at both locations did not change.
That… shouldn’t be possible.
Affirmative. Creation of black holes or wormhole not proven.
Well crap, this planet just gets weirder and weirder. Time until drop pod impact?
0.4 Solar Hours.
As the drop pod plummeted through the atmosphere, drinking in the energy created by doing so, the outer surface of its PA panel began to be rubbed off, leaving a trail of charged particles in its wake.
This was intentional.
The storm it was passing through suddenly found it had much more energy to express itself.
More energy. All was welcome.
The ground, made soggy by the storm, waited to welcome the new arrival.
A long cable line suddenly shot out of the drop pod, ending in a fairly large parachute-like balloon. If a twentieth century scientist were to see it, he would have laughed and said it was far too little and too late to prevent a terrible crash.
This, too, was intentional.
The balloon wasn’t designed to significantly slow down descent.
It was to ensure that the pod landed right side up, and to give the storm’s lightning a channel to strike through.
There was a mighty impact the force of several nuclear bombs as the drop pod hit the rain-soaked ground, creating a gigantic cloud of –
Wait, no.
That didn’t happen.
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Using some of its precious energy, the drop pod charged its PA panel to full at the moment of impact.
The massive *kaboom* instead became a small *thud*.
The kinetic power of several nuclear bombs was instead absorbed, shunted into its circuits, starting a chain reaction.
Energy was converted.
Transformed.
Activated.
Made to grow.
Lightning began to pelt the now-still pod. More energy. Every watt reduced the time required for full activation.
Entering final phase. User confirmation required.
Let's do it.
Preparing for synchronization. Total stasis of brain in 5.
4.
3.
2.
1.
I hate—
Scientifically speaking, teleporting a body is HIGHLY impractical for many reasons.
Copying a body, however…
A single human cell contains roughly ten billion bits of living information in constant motion.
A human brain therefore has 2.6x10^42 bits. That’s a lot to transmit right there, before the body is even involved. A perfect copy would have to be transmitted in real time.
But what if the body could be frozen, say to absolute zero before the copying? Or better yet, what if just the brain was frozen, and the body was built using a template at the receiving site?
You would have a complete living body, made to whatever standards you wanted, with a perfectly created brain…
Dead by the worst ice cream headache imaginable.
Nice try though.
Still, a certain scientist infamous for his out-of-left-field answers to problems came up with a solution: stopping TIME around the brain instead, long enough to copy it properly.
He later became good friends with the man who created the PA panel.
Being able to perfectly copy a human brain led to an incredible discovery: A person copied this way somehow exists simultaneously at both places at the SAME TIME. Two bodies, one mind. What was perceived by one body was picked up by the other. Distance didn’t matter.
Of course, having two sets of eyes, ears, and hands giving twice the information to one mind made life extremely difficult, to say the least.
The best answer was, of course, to remove the offending original body.
Oddly, there weren’t too many volunteers for that.
Still, with enough time and just the right amount of pressure…
In order to create a 200lb human body (with brain), you would need power roughly equal to the combined energy of 3,200 suns.
OR... a somewhat smaller amount of anti-matter, activated and contained with the energy from… say… a flight through an atmosphere and an impact onto a planet surface plus-or-minus a lightning strike or two?
The drop pod separated, the top half lifting off from the bottom, connected by an energy beam.
Within the beam a form started taking shape.
Nerves.
Blood vessels.
A brain.
Eventually it resolved itself into an athletic young black-haired man of medium build, wearing loose black clothes, a light backpack, and a brown utility belt that would not have looked out of place worn around Batman.
Suddenly the body jerked to life, taking in its first gasp of air.
—this part!
Transmission complete. Drop pod entering “spoilsport” phase. Warning: insufficient energy to maintain holding beam.
The top of the drop pod came down on his head with a heavy *thump*, and the world went away for a bit.