It’s taking me apart atom-by-atom. I’m conscious of every single electron cloud collapsing; I can feel every polar attraction sliced apart; I can almost taste the photons slowing. We’ve done this hundreds of times: on lumps of coal, on gasoline, on viruses, on bananas, cats and chimpanzees. I am the first human. No matter how complex the object, from the simplest one-atom-thick layer of graphite to the subtle labyrinth of biochemistry, the atomic scanning and disassembly always takes the same amount of time. We’re not entirely sure why. This process lasts exactly six hundred and thirty-eight milliseconds, and I wish it would end.
I saw my first episode of Star Trek when I was five years old. I’m sure I’d seen the show before then, but this is the first episode I remember watching. Captain Kirk goes through the transporter and comes out as two Kirks: one evil and one good. I remember thinking that good Kirk was a bit of a wimp, and evil Kirk was a bit of a dick. But good Kirk did the right thing, even though he didn’t have the courage to back it up, and evil Kirk did the wrong thing but at least had the cojones to follow through. Obviously, as a five year old, I wasn’t able to express it quite like that. But the notion stuck with me, the idea of balance and of one half tempering the other, and the other bolstering the one. But oddly enough, Star Trek isn’t why I became a physicist. That’s down to my father.
I don’t understand how I can feel this. I don’t know why I am conscious. The nerves in my body surely shut down a long time ago, after my spinal column was taken apart. I felt it disappearing, like a pinwheel down my back, like my spine was deflating. I felt my ribs cave in a little, my shoulders hunch backward. I had stopped breathing long before that point. I didn’t have any lungs then. I don’t think I have lungs now. I don’t know if I’m being taken apart or put back together. All I know is that I shouldn’t feel this.
My husband left me two years ago, just as I had begun conducting trials on organic molecules. It wasn’t my fault, he told me, that I loved my job more than him. That wasn’t true. I loved nothing more than him, but my job and I were intertwined. If it could have, my job would have loved him too. It was for the best, really. It took a weight off my mind, stopped me from worrying that he wasn’t happy because I wasn’t around. I told him he was right. He’d be better off with someone else. Besides, if he couldn’t understand how important my work was to me then he couldn’t have really loved me. It doesn’t matter now anyway because I don’t have a limbic system anymore.
I think my diaphragm just disintegrated. I can’t really distinguish between things down there. It might’ve been my intestines. Or my kidneys. No, those are still there. I can feel the tiny stone that just started forming in the left one. I should remember to get that checked out before it gets worse. If I survive. If I come out of this as myself. I hesitate to use the word “soul”, but it’s the best word I’ve got. We’re still not entirely sure if the transmitted substance is the same substance as went in. I mean, on a quantum level all particles are identical, sure, and the chimps we sent through displayed no severe mental damage or personality alterations, but on a practical level the outgoing system is completely different to the ingoing one. I can only hope that the incomprehensible weirdness we find in nature is on our side. Our dual-entanglement process compensates for Heisenberg by 99.916% but I can’t help but feel that that left-over 0.084% is gonna come back and bite me in the soul.
It wasn’t my fault. I swore to my father that it wasn’t my fault. The dog jumped in the water by himself and I didn’t know how to swim. I felt so helpless standing on the lake shore watching my best friend drown. There were plenty of people around, vacationers I could’ve asked for help, even neighbors and friends who would’ve swum out to save my dog, but I could only stand there and watch him die. I didn’t need the guilt. An eight-year-old girl doesn’t need to be accused of murder when she was just too scared to scream and too frightened to ask for help. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t.
Why am I still here? Why am I still experiencing this? It’s almost pain, but not quite. Almost pins and needles but not quite. It’s fear, the feeling that I am falling apart very slowly and it’s totally beyond my control, even though I put myself in here in the first place. Fear that I won’t be myself when I get to the other side. Six hundred and thirty-eight milliseconds. What can happen in six hundred and thirty-eight milliseconds? On a cosmic scale, it’s practically nothing. It’s roughly 0.000002% of one orbit around the sun. A photon in a vacuum will travel 191,267,588 metres. In six hundred and thirty-eight milliseconds the human body can be disassembled to its constituent subatomic particles and through a probability-harnessing dual-entanglement process “reassembled” 4.67 metres away at the other side of a whitewashed cinderblock laboratory just outside of Pasadena, California. One is destroyed and the other built from its blueprints. Will I know all this when I’m on the other side of the room?
It took me three attempts to pass the admissions process to MIT. I was bright and imaginitive as a child, but I never did well academically. That’s partly why I went into theoretical physics. I never realized how much math was involved. I’d assumed that I’d be inventing fanciful hypotheses about how light and gravity interact, or why things have mass. Instead I found myself memorizing endless equations and deriving functions that bored me to tears. But I graduated (magna cum laude, thank you) and moved to Chicago to start an internship in Fermilab during the muon g-2 experiments. I was aware of the ongoing forays into teleportation, but that was pretty fringe stuff at the time so I hadn’t paid much attention to it. Watching those little particles jump into existence out of nowhere is a sight I’d never forget.
There is darkness. The photons have stopped moving. Or maybe I have stopped moving. I don’t know if there is a difference. I am photons and electrons and quarks and muons and gluons and leptons baryons electrons neutrons they’re all gone now. If all those things that were me are at the other side of the room why am I still here? Where does my consciousness go? This is death. This it feels like. Disassembly. I’m not here.
My father killed our dog. No, I killed our dog. No, I didn’t kill the dog. No, my father killed my mother. That was it. I heard them argue. I don’t know about what. There were two Kirks. My mother fell down the stairs. Down. Stars. Muother. Felltons. Two quarks. Two quarks. Darkness. Up then down. I heard. I didn’t understand. I was taken apart very slowly and piece by piece until I heard my father coming up the stairs and I turned off the television and pulled my blanket over my head and pretended to be asleep and the little stream of photons when he poked his head through my bedroom door to completely disassemble me and stood there watching me pretend to sleep for so long that I thought I would never breathe again and finally closed the door and there was darkness again and I was completely taken apart and I was at the other side of the room watching myself sleep. Up and down, two quarks.
Death, and fear. I am across the room. And I am here. I am both at once. I am dead and I am alive. I cannot see myself, if I could see. I do not know who I will be when I wake up. Am I at the other side of the room, or am I here? I do not know who I will be when I am at the other side of the room. I do not know if I am at the other side of the room or if I am here. I do not know if those atoms are me. They are not mine. Not my atoms. Not mine. Two quarks.
My mother, up and down.
Two me. Two bodies. Two quarks, up and down. Dueal. Both at once. Dead and alive. Spin plus and minus. Two entangled. Two quarks, up and down.
Then death.
Mother’s death. He said. She fell he said. He was a good man. Good to me. Two quarks, superimposed. He gave me everything. My father, entangled. He was. He. Was. He was a scientist. Inspired. He inspired. Me. He inspired me to become. He inspired two quarks. I am so like my father. Two quarks, up and down. Two fathers, superimposed. Me, entangled. I am entangled. I am becoming distangled. Disentangled. Unentangled. Intangled. I am reassembling. I haven’t moved. I didn’t feel a move. I only felt everything coming apart and now I feel everything moving back into place. Things ramping up. Like an old car trying to start. Like a movie projector getting up to speed. I can see the laboratory. I can see my colleagues. I cannot move yet, but I know they are there. I have moved. I’m on the other side of the room. I can turn my head. I look to where I was and there is nothing there. I have been destroyed and I’ve been rebuilt. I’m complete, I’m whole again. I am alive.
I saw my first episode of Star Trek when I was five years old. I’m sure I’d seen the show before then, but this is the first episode I remember watching. Captain Kirk goes through the transporter and comes out as two Kirks: one evil and one good. I remember thinking that good Kirk was a bit of a wimp, and evil Kirk was a bit of a dick. But good Kirk did the right thing, even though he didn’t have the courage to back it up, and evil Kirk did the wrong thing but at least had the cojones to follow through. Obviously, as a five year old, I wasn’t able to express it quite like that. But the notion stuck with me, the idea of balance and of one half tempering the other, and the other bolstering the one. But oddly enough, Star Trek isn’t why I became a physicist. That’s down to my father.
I don’t understand how I can feel this. I don’t know why I am conscious. The nerves in my body surely shut down a long time ago, after my spinal column was taken apart. I felt it disappearing, like a pinwheel down my back, like my spine was deflating. I felt my ribs cave in a little, my shoulders hunch backward. I had stopped breathing long before that point. I didn’t have any lungs then. I don’t think I have lungs now. I don’t know if I’m being taken apart or put back together. All I know is that I shouldn’t feel this.
My husband left me two years ago, just as I had begun conducting trials on organic molecules. It wasn’t my fault, he told me, that I loved my job more than him. That wasn’t true. I loved nothing more than him, but my job and I were intertwined. If it could have, my job would have loved him too. It was for the best, really. It took a weight off my mind, stopped me from worrying that he wasn’t happy because I wasn’t around. I told him he was right. He’d be better off with someone else. Besides, if he couldn’t understand how important my work was to me then he couldn’t have really loved me. It doesn’t matter now anyway because I don’t have a limbic system anymore.
I think my diaphragm just disintegrated. I can’t really distinguish between things down there. It might’ve been my intestines. Or my kidneys. No, those are still there. I can feel the tiny stone that just started forming in the left one. I should remember to get that checked out before it gets worse. If I survive. If I come out of this as myself. I hesitate to use the word “soul”, but it’s the best word I’ve got. We’re still not entirely sure if the transmitted substance is the same substance as went in. I mean, on a quantum level all particles are identical, sure, and the chimps we sent through displayed no severe mental damage or personality alterations, but on a practical level the outgoing system is completely different to the ingoing one. I can only hope that the incomprehensible weirdness we find in nature is on our side. Our dual-entanglement process compensates for Heisenberg by 99.916% but I can’t help but feel that that left-over 0.084% is gonna come back and bite me in the soul.
It wasn’t my fault. I swore to my father that it wasn’t my fault. The dog jumped in the water by himself and I didn’t know how to swim. I felt so helpless standing on the lake shore watching my best friend drown. There were plenty of people around, vacationers I could’ve asked for help, even neighbors and friends who would’ve swum out to save my dog, but I could only stand there and watch him die. I didn’t need the guilt. An eight-year-old girl doesn’t need to be accused of murder when she was just too scared to scream and too frightened to ask for help. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t.
Why am I still here? Why am I still experiencing this? It’s almost pain, but not quite. Almost pins and needles but not quite. It’s fear, the feeling that I am falling apart very slowly and it’s totally beyond my control, even though I put myself in here in the first place. Fear that I won’t be myself when I get to the other side. Six hundred and thirty-eight milliseconds. What can happen in six hundred and thirty-eight milliseconds? On a cosmic scale, it’s practically nothing. It’s roughly 0.000002% of one orbit around the sun. A photon in a vacuum will travel 191,267,588 metres. In six hundred and thirty-eight milliseconds the human body can be disassembled to its constituent subatomic particles and through a probability-harnessing dual-entanglement process “reassembled” 4.67 metres away at the other side of a whitewashed cinderblock laboratory just outside of Pasadena, California. One is destroyed and the other built from its blueprints. Will I know all this when I’m on the other side of the room?
It took me three attempts to pass the admissions process to MIT. I was bright and imaginitive as a child, but I never did well academically. That’s partly why I went into theoretical physics. I never realized how much math was involved. I’d assumed that I’d be inventing fanciful hypotheses about how light and gravity interact, or why things have mass. Instead I found myself memorizing endless equations and deriving functions that bored me to tears. But I graduated (magna cum laude, thank you) and moved to Chicago to start an internship in Fermilab during the muon g-2 experiments. I was aware of the ongoing forays into teleportation, but that was pretty fringe stuff at the time so I hadn’t paid much attention to it. Watching those little particles jump into existence out of nowhere is a sight I’d never forget.
There is darkness. The photons have stopped moving. Or maybe I have stopped moving. I don’t know if there is a difference. I am photons and electrons and quarks and muons and gluons and leptons baryons electrons neutrons they’re all gone now. If all those things that were me are at the other side of the room why am I still here? Where does my consciousness go? This is death. This it feels like. Disassembly. I’m not here.
My father killed our dog. No, I killed our dog. No, I didn’t kill the dog. No, my father killed my mother. That was it. I heard them argue. I don’t know about what. There were two Kirks. My mother fell down the stairs. Down. Stars. Muother. Felltons. Two quarks. Two quarks. Darkness. Up then down. I heard. I didn’t understand. I was taken apart very slowly and piece by piece until I heard my father coming up the stairs and I turned off the television and pulled my blanket over my head and pretended to be asleep and the little stream of photons when he poked his head through my bedroom door to completely disassemble me and stood there watching me pretend to sleep for so long that I thought I would never breathe again and finally closed the door and there was darkness again and I was completely taken apart and I was at the other side of the room watching myself sleep. Up and down, two quarks.
Death, and fear. I am across the room. And I am here. I am both at once. I am dead and I am alive. I cannot see myself, if I could see. I do not know who I will be when I wake up. Am I at the other side of the room, or am I here? I do not know who I will be when I am at the other side of the room. I do not know if I am at the other side of the room or if I am here. I do not know if those atoms are me. They are not mine. Not my atoms. Not mine. Two quarks.
My mother, up and down.
Two me. Two bodies. Two quarks, up and down. Dueal. Both at once. Dead and alive. Spin plus and minus. Two entangled. Two quarks, up and down.
Then death.
Mother’s death. He said. She fell he said. He was a good man. Good to me. Two quarks, superimposed. He gave me everything. My father, entangled. He was. He. Was. He was a scientist. Inspired. He inspired. Me. He inspired me to become. He inspired two quarks. I am so like my father. Two quarks, up and down. Two fathers, superimposed. Me, entangled. I am entangled. I am becoming distangled. Disentangled. Unentangled. Intangled. I am reassembling. I haven’t moved. I didn’t feel a move. I only felt everything coming apart and now I feel everything moving back into place. Things ramping up. Like an old car trying to start. Like a movie projector getting up to speed. I can see the laboratory. I can see my colleagues. I cannot move yet, but I know they are there. I have moved. I’m on the other side of the room. I can turn my head. I look to where I was and there is nothing there. I have been destroyed and I’ve been rebuilt. I’m complete, I’m whole again. I am alive.
