A Scientist’s Ambition
The heat in the Wild West was no joke. The fiery ball of flames in the sky burned as though it was grasping at the oxygen to stay alive. The touch of sand at the bottom of his feet felt like a kind of torture that the unregulated judiciary might be inflicting on low-profile criminals who wouldn’t give an inch. Each step was more arduous than the one before it, and the only thing that kept Antoine going in this unfamiliar desert of wilderness was to declare to the world that he had finally done it. He had finally created the device that his fellow scientists would call him a lunatic for attempting to make.
“Have you got any water left?” asked Mike, who didn’t look half as exhausted as Antoine was sure he himself appeared. Perhaps spending your entire life in these parts gave you a sort of immunity to the horrors of the environment.
“Not a drop. How long until we get there?” Antoine enquired, doubtful of whether his body could last as long as his mind could.
“About an hour, I would say. More or less…”
Antoine had not signed up for this. All he wanted was to teleport himself to the block adjacent to his quarters, not halfway across the world. He did, however, realize where he went wrong. The position that had to be input into the device shouldn’t have been the absolute coordinates of the location. They should have been relative to the position of departure. He was lucky to not have ended up somewhere in outer space due to the rookie mistake that he had committed. But of course, he had taken safety measures in the event things went wrong, like the way they did, assuming he was still alive to deal with it. He had sent a duplicate device to the exact same location before he sent himself so that he would always have the means to return. What he did not account for, was the noise that was bound to interfere with the position.
Noise — the sworn enemy of all quantum physicists. It messes with every calculation you make because, by definition, quantum calculations aren’t absolute. However, this wasn’t the only risk he was taking by using his experimental device on a living, breathing, human being — himself. You see, he knew, that physical teleportation might as well be a story from out of a children’s fantasy book. But what he tried to do was not physically teleport matter. No, he tried to do something far more dangerous. Something that no other physicist would dare to attempt.
It was no secret in the scientific world that quantum entanglement was a phenomenon as real as any. It is by virtue of this, that two entangled particles, no matter how far from each other, could influence the existence and state of being of the other particle. This was the very basis for the quantum teleportation of information that one of his predecessors had discovered.
Quite simple actually.
Nevertheless, let’s get back to the point.
Antoine’s daring undertaking did not involve attempting to teleport objects, or well, people physically. Instead, what he did was teleport every bit of information that was required to recreate the object from scratch, followed by destroying the original object to avoid discrepancies in the material world. A simple analogy for it would be as follows — people usually think of teleportation as a cut-paste mechanism, where no information is lost mid-way. But what Antoine really did was copy-paste-delete, and although it sounds largely like the exact same thing, realistically speaking, the latter is quite an inhumane approach considering you’re blowing a person out of existence before replacing them with whatever a computer summed them up to be.
Antoine did not think he would make it through unscathed. He was expecting a limb or two of his to be missing. Alas, he did it anyway. Although his limbs on arrival seemed intact, his head did feel painfully weird. Could it be brain damage perhaps? Antoine didn’t know. Regardless, that was a concern for another day. At the very least, he had been lucky enough to find Mike, an infamous bounty hunter, who decided after hearing Antoine’s story, that they could most certainly exchange a helping hand.
“There it is! I see it!”
An odd-looking device lay half sunken in the middle of the desert. Antoine had not anticipated that his device would end up being this far from where he landed. Without Mike, he couldn’t possibly have made it here. But of course, Mike did not offer up the help for free.
Mike had only recently discovered that there was a hit put out on him and it might only be a matter of time before someone put the light out from his eyes as well. Knowing that he was now living on borrowed time, he could only think of sending his child a message to let her know that he hadn’t abandoned her for no reason. The situation had demanded it and a risky career change was all that Mike could do to continue to provide for his family, albeit from afar. Given that every post office now had enemies lurking, waiting to get even just the slightest hint of his whereabouts, he could think of no way to reach out to his child. That was until Antoine came by with his scientific jargon that Mike couldn’t understand the half of, but against all that his rational brain told him, chose to believe.
“So I can send a letter to my daughter through this… thing?”
“Why, of course!” said Antoine, unable to hide his excitement. He taps a couple of buttons and types a few words. The entire piece of equipment begins vibrating and in a quick flash, the letter vanishes. Mike stands awestruck.
“Now that we have gotten that over with, I shall take my leave.”
Antoine sits on a chair attached to the majestic device that looks almost frightening. Before Mike can thank him, Antoine vanishes just as his letter did.
“So… is this device that you left behind, for me then?” he says under his breath.
“…Well, in that case, I hope you don’t mind if I use the money from selling it to finally secure my way back to my family, leaving this life behind.”
3 DAYS LATER
Mike sits on his armchair, with the newspaper of the day. His daughter is playing that game with marbles just as he remembered.
“All’s well that ends well.”, Mike thinks to himself. He resumes reading the newspaper when suddenly, his eyes begin to widen.
“Professor Leonardo from the Salem Institute of Science & Technology creates the mind-boggling quantum teleportation device that the world never thought possible!”, the newspaper reads.
In the bottom-right corner of the paper lies another piece of relevant news — “Professor Antoine from the Salem Institute of Science and Technology, officially declared missing for the past 4 days.”
Mike sighs.
“Perhaps Antoine should have given it more thought, before risking losing himself a second time. On the bright side, at least his invention didn’t go entirely undiscovered.”
Antoine flips the page over while shaking his head, convinced of how he’ll never be able to understand, a scientist’s ambition.
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