Perfect Duplicates

Perfect World story (The ILLUMINATION)

(Reprinted from The Encyclopaedia Galactica, AD 2295)

Throughout time man has tried to shorten the time it takes to travel between where they were and where they wanted to be. Wonderful inventions have sprung forth from the human imagination to solve that dilemma-- but there has never been an invention as incredible as the Null Doorway.

The first great invention of transportation was the wheel. Many thousands of years later mechanized cars were invented; at first using the loud and dirty gasoline engine, followed a hundred years later by clever electrical vehicles. During that time air travel was developed, and was quick but expensive and crowded, and occasionally fatal in a big way. Humanity sought to speed things up even more, to rival the speed of jet planes on land, and in a mere fifty years had hooked trains to magnetic levitation rails. Thirty years after that we removed the air friction limitation by placing the trains in vacuum tunnels, which allowed us to flash past the speed of jets, and travel on the face of the Earth as quickly as the spacecraft which orbited above us. Advances in Deep Space Drives cut our travel time around the solar system, approaching one tenth the speed of light.

But humanity really had no idea how to cross truly vast distances until visionary scientist Seth Corell discovered a property of the universe called Null Space, and with it, figured out a way to move people from one place to another, regardless of distance, in the blink of an eye. This was an accomplishment which surpassed even the Holy Grail of travel, the Star Trek transporter!

The almost magical device was a metal and plastic rectangle resembling an airport-style metal detector, and that was all the equipment needed, except for an identical one on the receiving end. Gone were bulky trains and busses, noisy and crowded airplanes, heavy personal vehicles and landscape-marring roads and tracks. To travel, simply place a call from one Null Doorway to another and walk through. When connected, you could see the destination through the doorway in real time. You could even walk back and forth between locations, as long as the connection remained. Safety protocols prevented the euphemistic 'partial deliveries'.

Surprisingly low tech to build, soon there was a Doorway in every city, town and hamlet on Earth. And while the romance of old-fashioned road travel can never be denied, there was no faster way, no easier way, no more ecological way to travel than by using the Null Doorway.

But more creative uses were just around the corner. Jet-setting became passé, because now anyone could have breakfast in Belfast, lunch in Lima and dinner in Denver... what was next?

Null Doorways began showing up in bizarre locations: At the top of Mount Everest. Down in the dormant Haleakala volcano in Hawaii. At the North Pole, or more accurately, at the North Pole floating Center for Historical Study, as scientists were still finding unique and perfectly preserved prehistoric animal species amid the enormous ice debris field which used to be the North Pole. There was even an ill-fated attempt to place one Doorway in a research bubble deep in the Mariana Trench at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, which, after one horrendously crushed casualty, it was learned that a pressure/depressure chamber would be required in order to travel there.

And one was delivered to Moon Base Obama, which changed the concept of space travel forever. Suddenly, supplies and personnel commuted with ease. Factories would simply dial the Moon on their extra-large Null Doorway and forklift pallets through, as easily as loading a tractor-trailer. And because raw materials were now easy to get, the Moon colonists were able built a network of viable cities in only fifteen years, over half of them formed within the planetoid's extensive natural cave system. To support the exhaustive material needs dozens of short hop ships placed Null Doorways on asteroids to be mined in the Kuiper Belt.

It wasn't long before a sturdy galactic ship was built to drop Null Doorways onto every habitable planet it could find in the Milky Way Galaxy. Although it took dozens of years to travel to Earth's closest neighbor, the ship's staff could be home in time for dinner daily, thanks to the Null Doorway. Once proposed as a generational ship housing astronauts who would raise children to one day take command of the ship, and raise children of their own to do the same, it instead hosted a regularly changing staff of fresh-faced cadets eager to view new worlds-- men and women who finished their shifts and went home to sleep in their own beds on Earth at night. New propulsion methods were developed on Earth and installed on the ship until it traveled at nearly the speed of light. Because of time dilation at those speeds, a crewman leaving home for an eight hour shift aboard the ship returned instead in several months, and so astronauts wishing to stay the same relative age as their friends and family only rode one shift on the Lightship a year.

Thousands of doors were distributed through the galaxy, each expanding humanity's footprint as thriving settlements and towns, cities and nations were built. Communication between inhabited worlds was also instantaneous, keeping colonists not only abreast of All-Worlds Human News, but able to participate in events as well, allowing holidays like Christmas to be celebrated by all humans simultaneously. It was not unusual for billions of people to visit Earth's Times Square for New Year's Eve celebrations. The Miss Universe contest took on an entirely new meaning as contestants literally came from across the universe. The wonders of these worlds were now available to all humanity, including the stupefying split planet, stable yet cleaved by unknown forces millennia ago.

The Doorway changed emergency response time, too. Professional assistance showed up in seconds instead of minutes now. Paramedics simply rolled their victims ten feet directly into a hospital's triage center. Null Doorways were installed on the fuselages of fire-fighting aerial vehicles; when connected to an underwater Doorway, a deluge of sea water drowned any fire in moments. The reverse worked as well-- in a flood situation, Doorways were lowered into the rising flood waters, which would be routed back into the ocean, or indeed, to any place which needed the water.

Roads on Earth became largely pointless, and were all eventually uprooted except for the nationwide highway system. A network of permanent paths replaced the roads and were used for walking and biking, giving the cities a pastoral yet sophisticated feel.

But every panacea has its price, and the Null Doorway was no exception. Something macabre was happening, and the world first became aware of it when a naked man fell to Earth one day from 2 miles up. There had been no air traffic in that area. The body was positively identified as Parsa Vindaloo from New Delhi; a man who was alive and having tea when he learned that the victim was in fact, himself! Satellite imagery clearly showed him 'popping' into existence and falling to his death. Vindaloo had no twin brother, adding to the mystery.

Then word came from the Lightship-- it had encountered another naked human, but this one didn't die from a fall but from the icy vacuum of space. Then a junior astronomer on Earth reported that he had discovered a new star, but in fact had discovered a body, floating near Jupiter. A backpacker had come upon a naked dead human materialized halfway into a boulder.

The Astrophysicia was tasked with imaging every inch of the night sky, and they succeeded in capturing over 8,000 images of nude humans floating in the solar system. Identifying them confirmed that they had living counterparts on Earth. Several of them had twins, and one was a triplet, but all of their siblings were accounted for. And then the final piece of the puzzle occurred-- a woman using a Null Doorway in Austin died when her naked duplicate materialized on top of her, overlapping.

The Doorway system was shut down immediately and tested. A device which sent a unique signal to Earth was put through each door, searching for duplicate signals. The test was negative for every Doorway but one-- the Austin Door.

Humanity breathed a collective sigh of relief as the Doorways were brought back online, and the Austin door was disassembled and analyzed. An internal counter verified that the door had been used over a million times since being brought online, which meant there were probably as many human copies floating around the galaxy, most of them probably dead from materializing in space.

Doctors pored over the duplicate humans as well, trying to ascertain exactly how copied the originals had been. Much was answered after the autopsies, which revealed that the brains of the naked copies had never been used-- not for memory, not for thinking, not even for autonomous systems. They were as smooth and unwrinkled as fresh paper. The doctors deduced that they never felt any emotion or physical feeling, and may not have been able to see or hear, or even breathe. There wasn't any information whatsoever to be found in any of their brains-- in other words, they came into existence dead.

The Astrophysicia, ever the passionless scientific body, was looking for a silver lining in the horrendous tragedy and determined exactly how the damaged Doorway was duplicating. The originals had gone through the door wearing clothing and carrying items, and yet the Doorway had only copied the biological matter. They managed to repair the directional array so that copies could be directed to a specific receiving Doorway in the lab, and began to try other products. They rolled a cart with a full Thanksgiving dinner through the faulty Doorway. It passed through unchanged and rolled to a stop, but the duplicated food came through the target Doorway in the lab a few feet away and dropped to the floor on the other side, cartless and plate-less. They passed it through again, and a second copy was made. It was just as hot and delicious as the original! As many times as they tried, it worked. Two scientists then had an apple toss through the damaged Doorway, and each time another duplicate apple shot through the second door. Soon they had a barrel of identical apples, each as crisp and juicy as the first. They soon realized what had been inadvertently created-- the first Xerox machine for food. They called it a Foodocopier

It was the end of hunger for the human race.

Copyright 2009 Bruce Ian Friedman