Teleportation - An Inside Look

As someone - I can't quite remember who - once said, the secret to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Teleportation (or quantum locomotion, if you prefer) operates on a similar principle - forget that you have a body.

The first thing that is difficult for those who were brought up on planets to understand is that you are not your body. Those beings raised in a eco-dependent biosphere have trouble believing this, because it is counterintuitive. After all, you came into existence on the planet as the result of some sort of reproductive process on the part of your parent or parents, be it sexual congress, spawning, cloning, or simply spitting on the sidewalk(1). You live within the biosphere, subject to its laws of energy exchange, requiring food and liquid to maintain your body(2), and then, finally, your body gives out, and you die - that is, you disappear from your native biosphere, and all your friends and relatives are unhappy, and hold a funeral(3). And, as far as anyone within the biosphere can tell, that is that. End of story.

The truth of course is quite different, as it so usually is in these chronicles. For, by dying, by exiting the shell with which you have interfaced with your native biosphere, you perform your first quantum leap. Because it is then - and, for most sentients, only then - that you discover what you should have suspected all along. You are not your body(4).

A sentient being is in reality a nexus of energy fields in space-time which reacts to materiality generated by dimensional gravity wells in the multiverse by attaching itself and forming a material interface in accordance with the narrativium(5) of the material dimension. It is the nexus - itself a complete noncorporeal entity - which constitutes sentience per se - the rest is window dressing, as it were.

The fact that so many beings in so many dimensions expend so much time, energy, and fan email on the window dressing part is subject for another essay(6).

Be that as it may, the desideratum of the teleporteur in spe should be to be able to change dimensional loci without first undergoing bodily dissolution - largely because it is painful, expensive, and basically no fun at all.

The first step to this - one which is mere child's play to anyone who has managed to read this far(7) - is a lively imagination. After all, you can't go anywhere unless you look up your destination first.

The second step is more difficult. You must become aware of your mind. Not your brain, not your thoughts, not the part of you that does the Times crossword in ink every Sunday afternoon(8), but the nexus. And that, too, is easier than you think. It simply requires you to be completely absent-minded.

The nexus is actually just the part of you that knows what it's like to fly, even if you have never fallen off the roof. The part that knows how a peanut butter milkshake would taste(9) - and acts accordingly.

The nexus knows - but the narrativium-obsessed interface mind, the one that remembers how to tie shoelaces and find the blasted car keys - does not.

For this reason, most space stations have transporter equipment. After all, a few hundred thousand poscreds' worth of hardware - and a tech to push the buttons - is cheaper than an army of Jungian gurus tasked with persuading the unwilling into taking the leap(10).

The purpose of the equipment is twofold. One - to inspire confidence in the traveller. There's nothing like a strobe light, hologenerator, and a bit of neon to convince your average sentient that he is in the capable hands of Science.

The second is to accomplish the real task of teleportation - that of moving the focus of the nexus off the current location in space-time. The destination coordinates are preset, and are no problem at all(11). This the transporter does by creating an unnatural, contrary-to-fact state in the mind of the sentient.

'Oh no!, he thinks. I'm going to leap out of reality! But I can't! But I must - Aunt Tilda is waiting on Betelgeuse with cakes and jam! Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh...IS THAT A PURPLE COW??? Leap.

You see? Nothing to it!

May all our problems be so simple to solve. And may technology pave our way to a brighter tomorrow - or yesterday - in the space-time locus of our choice.

Happy wanderings, friends!

FOOTNOTES:
1 Which, besides being in contravention of the Gross Indecency Act of 2555, violates Good Housekeeping rules, so don't do it. You have been warned.
2 And often being required to do the most awful things to obtain them - such as work.
3 Your enemies are glad, and throw a party. Unfair. I know. We live to make our friends happy, and our enemies sad - we die to make our enemies happy, and our friends sad.
4 A fact hitherto suspected only by dieters.
5 Or plot-rules.
6 And, occasionally, sadness.
7 Or, indeed, any other of the demented screeds of this writer.
8 What else is there to do until teatime?
9 De gustibus non disputandum, as the hummingbird said to the fish.
10 Have you looked at what kind of salaries those fellows pull these days? Ye gods.
11 See Carlos Castaneda, complete works.