by Tal Klein
Every year since the Big Mac’s inception in 1967, the McDonald’s-Huáng Corporation17 has utilized a combination of the earth’s brightest humans and technological advances to ensure that whenever you stepped into a McDonald’s and ordered a Big Mac, you’d get the exact same Big Mac.
In the beginning, it was mostly about the basics. An illustrated instruction manual was distributed to employees, specifically detailing where every element was supposed to go, and in what order. Then they issued specially calibrated sauce guns to ensure the same amount of special sauce was applied to each sandwich with each pull of the trigger. As the operation expanded, it became harder to ensure that the ingredients for Big Macs would come from identical-tasting sources. Food chemicals were introduced to make flavors and textures uniform worldwide. Vegetables were precut and shipped in vacuum-sealed containers to guarantee freshness and consistency in size.
But still, perfection eluded the fast-food giant. For about a hundred years, the best McDonald’s could do to build an ideal Big Mac at every one of its locations was to combine tightly controlled sourcing and distribution with exacting instructions for sandwich architecture, preparation, and packaging.
Then, on January 16, 2048, McDonald’s solved for the consistency problem with cloning. Every Big Mac consumed henceforth would now be molecularly identical.
This, Moti continued, is where we run into something called the Theseus paradox, which is very important to burger construction, but even more important to my current existential dilemma. The gist of the Theseus paradox went like this:
Theseus and his squad of Athenians had a bunch of epic adventures aboard a big fancy wooden ship—most famously defeating the Minotaur in Crete. To honor their memory, Theseus’s legendary vessel was docked and preserved by the Athenians for several centuries. Long enough for all of the original wood to have rotted. Over the years, as each of the boat’s planks decayed, the Greeks put a new one in its place, so that by the age of Demetrius Phalereus several centuries later, every single original oar and plank of the vessel had been replaced.
The question is, if none of the original parts were still there, was it still the same ship of Theseus? Or was it now just a new ship that shared all of the original’s characteristics?
In the abstract, this alone is a big philosophical conundrum. But it quickly gets dicier.
Say you went to two different McDonald’s restaurants on polar opposite ends of the world, and ordered a Big Mac from each. Upon delivery of the second Big Mac, you unwrapped both sandwiches and placed them side by side in front of you. Then you swapped the bottom half of the one on the left with the one on the right. Were they both still the same Big Mac?
Prior to 2048, the subject would have been up for debate, thanks to the Theseus paradox. Some might have said that while you still had two Big Macs in front of you, neither of them was now the original sandwich, due to variations in the places they came from, the subtle differences in construction, and the people who made them.
After the cloning innovation, however, both Big Macs were pretty much the same. I say “pretty much” because there were still variables in the way each burger had been handled prior to delivery—environmental conditions associated with the point of origin, the impact of time on the final product, and so on. The fact that there could be more than one at a time didn’t quite solve for the Theseus paradox, but it was deemed close enough.
But then, in 2106, McDonald’s upped the consistency ante for the last time. You may have left the previous paragraph asking yourself, If we cloned the Big Mac and exchanged parts between the new “copy” and the original, would the original still be the original? Or you were not asking that, and that’s okay, I asked it for you, and, boy, aren’t you glad I did? No, you’re not, because in 2106 the question became irrelevant. Technology had finally caught up to our exacting laziness. Once McDonald’s solved for cloning, the only problem that remained was delivery—how to ensure that every Big Mac would be cooked and prepared in exactly the same way. The burgers might have been identical, but they could still taste different. To jump this last hurdle, McDonald’s-Huáng needed to go beyond cloning to true replication.
I’m really hoping you already know all of this and have skipped ahead. But if you don’t, or you didn’t, the difference between cloning and replication goes something like this:
In 2048, they managed to string molecules together in a preordained symphony, but the underlying atoms were free to dance to it in their own way. In 2106, not only were they printing out molds of well-behaved atoms, but each quark was swinging through, tangoing with, and leaping over Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, exactly as expected. Accomplishing this for one string of molecules was considered a feat; now the good scientists at Mickey D’s had to grapple with replicating the trillions of atoms that made up a Big Mac.
Ever hear of something called density functional theory (DFT)? If you think it sounds like something a physicist might do to predict the volume of their farts while sitting on the toilet, you’re not far off. DFT is a method for determining the electronic structure of matter.
Sylvia is fond of saying, “The biggest trick in quantum physics is figuring out what happens next.”18
As the cornerstone of computational physics, DFT has been a very popular way to figure out “what something does next” since as early as the 1970s. Once it became feasible to determine the electronic structure of matter, then reproducing said matter became an exercise in computational capacity: the more complex the object, the more computing power necessary to calculate its continuous quantum variables using DFT. This is important in the realm of replication because the computer doesn’t technically reproduce the things being replicated until after they have already arrived. A virtual version of the object arrives at its destination, the DFT algorithm analyzes it, compares it to the original object, and, if satisfied that the current state of the arriving object matches the next state of the original object, then it’s actually there—otherwise, it never arrived. Cool stuff.
It took a while for the necessary quantum computing capacity to develop so that we could perfectly calculate the future molecular state of something as complex as a Big Mac. But by 2106, we were there. The ability to scan and reproduce complex objects at scale simply became an exercise in cost reduction, consumer-oriented design, and fabrication. It also kicked off what quickly became known as the Quantum Age. A new era of human evolution, defined by a double cheeseburger. Sounds about right.
Within the next decade, replication printers became the essential gotta-have-it kitchen appliance. Why wait for water to freeze when you can simply point your cup at the printer, tell it the exact number of ice cubes along with whatever beverage you want them floating in, and presto! Coke on the rocks. Or bourbon and Coke on the rocks. Or just two fingers of bourbon, neat, forget the rocks, you lush.
Some people thought printers would collapse the market value of things like expensive liquor, fancy cheese, and truffles—but corporations picked up the slack. Actually, as far back as the twentieth century, companies have been patenting recipes, like the aforementioned Coke, and KFC spice blends. Replication actually proved to be a very effective way of weeding out forgeries. Could you replicate a burger that was very similar to a Big Mac? Sure. You could even jailbreak your printer, buy a Big Mac, and then replicate it for your friends—but it wouldn’t be the same—the copy wouldn’t be “signed” by McDonald’s.
We humans place a lot of stock in originality—our culture has always focused on “the real thing” having true tangible value, and with molecular signatures, it has become nearly impossible to make illegitimate replications of anything patented. Vive l’original! And anyway, each printer has an origin signature, so even if someone hacked a burger into seeming like a Big Mac by engineering something called a “signature collision,” they would also need to somehow spoof the origin of that burger to be from the Golden Arches HQ. So even if you replicated something with the legitimate McDonald’s
key, the receiving printer would still flag the duplicate as fake and you’d get in trouble. Granted, I’m not sure how much trouble someone would get into for breaking the cipher and replicating a Big Mac, but it’s a slippery slope from Big Macs to, say, gold bars—which is actually why certain things can’t be printed but pretty much anything can be teleported.19
It was so obvious once Moti explained it. Teleportation and printing: one and the same. Corina and Taraval had told me a truth I never wanted to know: the only difference between replication and teleportation is that the first allowed for multiple instances of the same object, and the latter didn’t.
Teleporting living things was much trickier than inanimate objects, however, owing to the previously mentioned fidget problem—living things have a tendency to move. Some very smart people figured out that this issue could be solved by calculating the future, rather than present, state of qubits.20
Twenty-six years after it became technically possible, sometime in 2127, human teleportation was legalized in the United States. Even so, there was no small amount of controversy—all owing to the soul. Many religious leaders issued various herems, encyclicals, decrees, and fatwas against any who would partake in or facilitate teleportation, declaring it an anathema. The most vocal of these was a zealot picketer named Roberto Shila. He unified the disparate protestors under a singular, devout, antiteleportation agenda. They declared the place one goes during teleportation Gehinnom, and themselves Gehinnomites.
Ultimately, the question of human teleportation’s legality came to be tested in a class-action suit brought on by one Joanna Shila, the daughter of the Gehinnomite founder. She sued International Transport for the deaths of all sentient beings who would be teleported. After bouncing around in lower federal courts, the case finally reached the Supreme Court. The legal question before the court boiled down to the Theseus paradox.
Given:
• Jane Doe (JD1) steps into the foyer of teleport chamber A (at the origin)
• Jane Doe (JD2) is teleported to the vestibule of teleport chamber B (at the destin)
Is Jane Doe (JD2) the same person as Jane Doe (JD1)?
Entered into evidence were thousands of tests on other living things before we put humans through the ringer, and each study reached the same conclusion: the Jane Doe (JD2) who showed up on the other side was the exact same person, physically, mentally, and emotionally, as Jane Doe (JD1) at the point of origin. Even her comms followed her to the destination.
The only nonbiblical evidence submitted by the plaintiffs that had anything to do with the actual process of teleportation was the aforementioned weight loss that occurred every time a sentient being teleported. This, you’ll remember, was only a few grams and made no discernible change in the teleported subject, so was ruled to be “packet loss.”
In a 5–4 ruling with some strident dissents, the Supreme Court held for International Transport, but with a caveat: teleportation was fine for sentient beings, but printing them whole was a crime against humanity. Once the decision propagated to the masses and was accepted into the global zeitgeist, only the Levant and the Gehinnomites remained steadfast in their opposition to teleportation.
After the case was decided, International Transport was cleared to teleport anyone and everyone. Of course, they left out the part where TCs weren’t porting anybody anywhere; they were merely printing them in one place and clearing them in the other.
Got it? Replication was a technical marvel, the centuries-in-the-making fruit of man’s scientific ingenuity. Whereas teleportation was a marketing marvel, the glorious paragon of mankind’s unlimited appetite for obfuscated convenience.
Therefore, intoned Moti, if IT replicated the ship of Theseus, then the replicated vessel would be a copy, but if they teleported it, then it would still be the original ship. Does it technically solve for the Theseus paradox? Well, since the paradox itself is just a matter of human perception, then it’s not really a paradox—it’s a conundrum, which means that as long as the ruling majority agrees that the vessel that came out of the TC is the real ship of Theseus, then it is.
There are some other interesting nuances. One of them is that teleportation is exponentially more expensive than replication—mostly because of insurance. Once you destroy an original, it’s really gone. Its unique signature goes poof, since the rule is there can only be one of anything that gets teleported. If you googled stories about the early days of teleportation, you’d find plenty of hilarious and depressing anecdotes about things that went awry. Sometimes things would get destroyed prior to successful teleportation; other times they’d be teleported and fall off the teleporter rig. Thus, some invaluable assets such as the aforementioned priceless painting, as well as other precious artifacts, were inadvertently sacrificed as collateral damage in humanity’s quest for a shorter commute. All of that happened a long time before we started teleporting people, mind. Before the Punch Escrow.
I’m guessing if you asked anyone from IT about the moral implications, they would likely extol humanity’s well-documented historical grapples with new transportation technologies. When railroads were first introduced, some people thought the speed would be so intense, it would cause their organs to shoot out of their rectums. But folks still got on board. Whether via land, sea, air, or ether, the desire for more efficient transport has always trumped philosophical worries.
“So,” finished Moti, having gone through several more cigarettes during his long-ass lecture, “since the Isleworth Mona Lisa is now the ‘real’ Mona Lisa, and a Big Mac you eat is a real Big Mac, and teleportation and replication are the same, it follows that the Joel Byram in Costa Rica is now the ‘real’ Joel Byram. And you, Yoel, are no one.”
Whether it was due to his confirmation of my nonexistence, my exhaustion catching up with me, or some other reason, my eyes rolled into the back of my head. I slipped from the plastic chair, cracking my head on the rock-hard floor and slipping into unconsciousness for the third time that day.
17 In May of 2046, the Huang Group, the largest commercial real estate firm in China, announced a purchase of all of the stock of the McDonald’s Corporation for approximately $108 billion. It was the largest stock acquisition by a Chinese company of an American company to date. At the time of this writing, the McDonalds-Huang Corporation is the third most powerful corporation on Earth.
18 DFT is a computational quantum mechanical modeling method used in physics, chemistry, and materials science to investigate the electronic structure of many-body systems, in particular atoms and molecules. DFT has roots in “crazy cat guy” Schrödinger’s equation. It’s a partial differential equation that describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes with time. Since replication and teleportation require capturing infinite dimensions of an object and then predicting their future state, DFT could be used to break down atoms and molecules into electronic and nuclear components to achieve something called the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The important thing is that this so-called “approximation” needs to be really fucking exact or all shit goes to hell, so the computing power necessary to calculate the future state of something is directly proportional to its complexity and dependencies. Finding an equation that integrates Moore’s law with DFT to predict complexity and distance of replicated or teleported objects was one of Sylvia’s pet projects.
19 Okay, this one is pretty complicated. There were whole books written on the creation myth of molecular patent signatures (MPSes) and the rise of commercial replication, but they are very boring books. The most popular theory is that MPSes have their origins in something called BitTorrent. BitTorrent was an old Internet protocol that was used to share large files across the net very efficiently. Suppose Jane Doe decided she wanted to use BitTorrent to share a song she made. She would take her song and make it available on her computer as a file called a torrent. The original file, as hosted on her computer, was called a seed. What BitTorrent did was split the file up into lots of pieces, such that anyone
who wanted the file could use a BitTorrent client to request it from the seed host (Jane’s computer). The torrent file of the original song included a cryptographic hash of each chunk of the torrent. Every requesting client was sent one of the pieces and accumulated all the remaining pieces, over a period of time, from other people’s requesting computers through distributed communication. At any given moment, each requesting computer was downloading some parts of the file from some of the other requesting peers and uploading other parts of the file to other peers. If any requester got sent data that didn’t match the cryptographic hash, the BitTorrent client would reject the content and seek an original elsewhere. This proved to be a very robust method for integrity protection. The compute cost of generating something called a “preimage attack” that would essentially brute-force something called a “collision,” where an attacker might stumble upon the cryptographic hash of a file and be able to reproduce it, was prohibitively expensive, if not impossible. Just prior to commercial replication’s heyday, the notion of such cryptographic hashes was revisited in the context of molecular signatures to ensure the integrity of replicated items. The printer network worked similarly to the way BitTorrent worked, with the point of origin for any item being replicated essentially being a “seed,” and each printer wanting to reproduce that item being a “client.” To prevent replication of valuable or patented goods, printers could only reproduce items with MPSes that they were licensed for. However, even jailbroken printers that were hacked to circumvent MPS licensing couldn’t reproduce items like gold or Big Macs because the network would detect an unlicensed request for a privileged MPS and only offer error messages until a valid license was provided.
20 A qubit is a “quantum bit.” An important distinguishing feature between a qubit and a classical bit is that multiple qubits can exhibit quantum entanglement. Entanglement is a nonlocal property that allows a set of qubits to express higher correlation than is possible in classical systems. Particles that have interacted at some point retain a type of connection and can be entangled with each other in pairs, in a process known as correlation. Knowing the spin state of one entangled particle—up or down—allows one to know that the spin of its mate is in the opposite direction. What’s really cool is that due to the phenomenon of superposition, each measured particle has no single spin direction before being measured but is simultaneously in both a spin-up and spin-down state. The spin state of each particle being measured is decided at the time of measurement and communicated to the correlated particle, which simultaneously assumes the opposite spin direction to that of the measured particle. Einstein called this behavior “spooky action at a distance.” Quantum entanglement allows qubits that are separated by incredible distances to interact with one another instantaneously (not limited by the speed of light).