Drive Time

by Matt Wilkinson

  PRE-Innovations were aware that their expectations for future society might sound like communism to some, but they knew there would be a vast difference between that economic system and their own. Communism tried — and mostly failed — to make citizens equal by sharing the wealth among the people, causing an unhappy median, whereas theirs would allow maximum wealth to all. The monetary definition of the term wealth no longer applied since their future was imagined to be free of an economy. Wealth would only refer to the prosperity of every individual, and every individual would have all the wealth they desired. Individualism might be a better definition of their system, but it failed to convey the sense of community that they hoped would ensue and since the communism moniker was taken and held negative connotations, they had decided they would refer to it as utopianism. This word may have previously been used to describe impossible ideologies, but the group felt that utopia was now well within reach.

  Spencer was playing with a rat that they had acquired for testing the portals.

  “Do we really have to make this guy go through there? If it doesn’t work and it injures or kills one of us, we can reset. Plus, we were assured that it works.”

  “Well, if we assembled it incorrectly and it doesn’t work, I’d rather see the rat hurt than any of us," Victor said.

  “We’ll reset, so we won’t remember anyway. I’d like to volunteer myself in the rat’s place, I don’t want an act of cruelty to be the start of this, it’s supposed to be altruistic.”

  “Fair enough, Spencer. Always the hero.” Victor smiled at her.

  “All done. Who’s next?” Beth said as she returned to the room.

  The teleporter schematics had arrived with a new set of backups for the group. Beth had chosen to undergo her write first, along with Sarah and James who’s writes were also almost finalised. They had purchased and received delivery of three more reclining chairs so up to four minds could be written simultaneously, which would be more efficient since they were now seven and about to be eight.

  “I could use a nap," Jules said.

  “Alrighty then, away you go.”

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Everyone had completed the merging of their minds by the time Zack arrived. Simon had picked him up from the airport and driven him back to Harrogate. When Zack joined his new colleagues at HQ, the first thing — or the pair of things — that his eyes registered were the two large hoops at one end of the room. Then the mechanical man asked if he’d like a cup of tea. His eyes lit up, and he responded gleefully in the affirmative.

  “Are those what I think they are?” Zack asked.

  “If you think they’re teleporters, then yes," Simon confirmed.

  “You finished them in two days?”

  “Technically around two years, but yes, two days in this reality. Drive time, remember. We were most of the way there anyway.”

  “Did you try them out?”

  “We were waiting for you.”

  Zack grinned. “That’s quite the initiation gift.”

  “Well, technically we already tried them out quite a bit in other timelines that we’ve gained the memory of, but you’re part of the group now, so you have to be present for the first temporally linear trial.”

  “Wow. Any doubts I had about this are obliterated.”

  “We have your backup ready for when you want to catch up to us, but I assumed you’d rather go in blind at first, for the fun of it. Are you feeling up to trying it out now? We’re all quite eager. Or do you need to rest for a while?”

  “I could use a trip to the bathroom, but once I’m done we can get straight to it, I’m just as eager.”

  After Zack had finished his business in the lavatory, he came out to find the group alert to his presence, virtually hopping foot to foot.

  “Okay, everyone is here, let’s power these babies up," James said.

  Simon tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and the hoops began to whir, revolving like wheels from their bases. There was then a peculiar build up of what looked like liquid spreading inwards from the circumference of the circle to its centre. When the hoop was filled, it looked like they were staring into a pool of rainbow coloured water flipped on its side, unaffected by gravity, but the flipside also gave the same impression.

  “It’s a stargate," Zack said.

  “No, it’s a teleporter," Simon corrected, missing that Zack was speaking comparatively.

  “But it looks a lot like the stargates in the movie and TV show.”

  “Alright, it’s a stargate, but it’s totally a coincidence.” Victor had to admit. “I think theirs works via some kind of wormhole, while ours breaks you down and reassembles you, like subatomic LEGO. It just so happens that the circle is the best shape for it when it revolves, the scan is more accurate. The centre looks like liquid, but it’s actually a swirling, particle thin mass of subatoms.”

  Spencer picked up an apple from a nearby bowl of fruit and tossed it through the portal closest to her, it reappeared through the portal next to it and dropped to the platform on which the hoop spun. The team all looked at each other, grinning, knowing that the impromptu first test had been a success.

  “Momentum doesn't transfer to the new portal.” She told Zack. “The apple was scanned quickly as it moved through the first portal and disintegrated, the apple at the second portal is a perfect copy minus the kinetic energy, so there’s no reason for it to be moving like the first. Time for me to take the trip.” Spencer said.

  “Fire away," Sarah said.

  Spencer approached the hoop on the left. She reached her arm out toward the surface of the pool. Her fingers stopped just short for a second, then she slowly pushed forward. Her fingertips penetrated it’s surface, again like a pool of water. Everyone looked at the hoop on the right, her fingertips appeared on its fluidic surface, floating in the relative position that her fingers had entered in the other hoop.

  “Okay,” Sarah said to Zack. “what’s happening here is, the hoop has scanned her fingertip and transferred the data to the other hoop, where the particle film reassembles the fingers. The film of particles is more like a solid than a liquid, it’s holding her fingertips in place in the middle. Effectively her fingers have been sliced off and placed over there. Don’t worry, it’s painless, the teleporter is working at a subatomic level, and her blood flow is still running through her fingertips, it’s just being teleported back and forth as it circulates through her veins. As far as her brain knows, her fingers were still in one piece, receptors of pain in her flesh or bones haven’t been triggered. If you were to prick her finger, she’d feel it as if they were still attached. As the sub-atomic particles are pure energy, her nerves can still pass electrical signals, since the electricity is also made up of the same particles.”

  Spencer stepped further toward the film on her hoop, more of her arm appeared from the companion portal.

  “Her sleeve is there. How does it differentiate?” Zack asked.

  “Well, again, it’s because the scan is so thorough, at a sub-particle level. The scan knows that they're separate objects and keeps them that way. No need to worry about a bug running into the teleporter and merging with Spencer.”

  Spencer took a few more steps, completely disappearing into the surface of the film on the left and following her arm out of the surface of the hoop on the right.

  “See," she said. “Complete and in working order.” She waved her limbs and fingers around to prove it.

  “We just put every magician out of business," Sarah said.

  “Can... I?” Zack asked.

  “Sure," Sarah said.

  Zack approached the teleporter, plunged his left arm through the surface, and it appeared from the hoop to the right. He moved his arm to the far right side of his portal, and the arm transferred to the left of the exit unit. Zack reached out with his right arm towards the arm that was protruding from the other pool and grabbed for it, shaking his own left hand. He chuckled and looked at the others, they smiled back, fully
participating in his wonder. Zack pulled his arm back out of the film and looked at the hand at its end. He wiggled his fingers in front of his face and smiled some more, then he walked straight through the teleportation hoop, reappearing in front of its partner.

  “That is so weird and disorienting," he said. “Felt a bit dizzy after.”

  “Yeah, closing your eyes doesn’t even help, for some reason," James said. “It’s probably an inner ear thing. The brain is confused by the signals from the vestibular system reversing instantaneously. When the in and out portals are pointing in opposite directions, you come out facing in the same direction, so it doesn’t feel as bad.”

  “Are the portals easily dismantled?” Zack asked.

  “The hoop can be removed from the base and broken into quarters," Sarah said.

  “So we can take one elsewhere and test its long-range capabilities?”

  “Well, we know it will work, but we can create a new one if you like. Now we have these hoops, we can use them to spit out as many copies of an item as we like. The makeup of the teleportation device is already stored digitally on the drive, we just need to tell it to create a new one using the hoops we already have. They’re really just larger versions of the SARA. You can take it back with you and use it for instant travel back here.” Simon said.

  Zack was thrilled that Simon had taken the hint.

  Victor walked to the portal on the left. “Go ahead.” He said.

  Simon tapped a few keys, and the portal parts began to slowly emerge from within the vertical pool, Victor took hold of them and placed them on the ground once they were whole.

  “Goodbye commerce," Zack said.

  “Indeed," Simon said. “We will have our androids assemble a few large hoops in the factory. We can create some sizable items with a portal of twenty feet in diameter. They’re currently producing more SARA, ready for distribution, they’re mainly used for smaller objects and food items.”

  “I take it that they have safety protocols built in? No one will be able to dispose of bodies in them, right?”

  “Yes, there’s a safety measure that recognises the human form and will protect the resulting digitisation on the drive from deletion. If anyone tries to dispose of a body, the authorities can be alerted if the disposal isn't authorised first. Morticians and the like would be fully pre-authorised.”

  The team were now taking several pieces of teleportation hoop to a packing area. Isaac would box up the parts, which could then be shipped directly to Zack’s apartment in Houston.

  Victor took a pair of photon boxes, plugged one into the quantum computer and gave the other to Zack.

  “Just put this in the slot on the hoop base, it’s labelled photon box, you can’t miss it. It will connect you to the exchange on the computer.” He said.

  “I didn’t hand in my notice on my apartment yet. I could keep it now that this will reduce the commute time substantially.”

  “Absolutely. We’ll overnight the portal to Houston for you. There are instructions included for construction and use.”

  “That would be great," Zack said, excited.

  “You could head back right now if you like, wait until the portal arrives, then come straight back, you won’t miss much. Literally.”

  “Ah. Got ya. I’ll order a taxi.”

  Once the taxi arrived, Zack noted the time and left with just a carry-on. One minute later, Simon got a notification from the exchange that there was a demand for teleportation to their headquarters. He checked the details and accepted the request.

  Zack stepped out of the left teleporter.

  “Welcome back," Simon said. “How long did the shipment take?”

  “A couple of days. I just had a couple of nice days off. Had a bit of a Star Wars marathon, read some books I’d been having trouble finding time for. Another great thing about all of this; I can cancel the movers now.”

  “Yeah, that must come next on the list, after time and space now being meaningless.”

  The pair laughed.

  “I installed it right in my apartment," Zack said. “Four thousand seven hundred miles like stepping through a door into another room.” he grinned.

  “And it beats going through immigration.”

  “Anything does. It’s weird when I think that I’m still out there in a taxi headed for the airport too.” He pointed out of the window.

  “Yeah, double Zacks until time catches up on itself.” Simon tapped on his keyboard. “Want to give me the address for that overnight delivery that you already received?”

  Chapter 48

  Later that day, Zack made another duplicate teleportation hoop using his gate in Houston. Zack’s teleporter had required refuse for recycling, to allow new objects to be created at his side, the subatomic particles needed for construction couldn’t be conjured out of thin air. Though the air itself could be broken down into particles, it didn’t provide the most efficient supply. The disintegration and reintegration cycle of the SARA and teleportation hoops may be self-sustainable — as the team had discussed — when the teleporters were to be hooked up to the existing plumbing, but until then it needed to be fed with source material manually. Zack had thrown all of his household waste into the hoop before he had made his first trip back to HQ, so he had a slight surplus of material for sending items back through. It hadn’t been enough for anyone else to join him on his return journey through the portal in Houston, however, so he had to go on a hunt for waste. Zack had toured his neighbourhood until he found discarded curbside objects labelled as free to take, returning with a sofa that had seen better days, some shelving and a dresser. He threw the disposable items into the hoop, and it broke them down into particles which were then converted into osmium, a metallic element known to be the densest on earth. Technically, PRE-Innovations had the power to synthesise new elements with a higher density of those that were natural, but they had yet to spend time on its conception. The newly conjured metal was sent to a tank connected to the portal’s base and, when needed, the osmium could again be broken down into particles and used to construct new items. The street junk had been more than enough to reconstruct Spencer when she arrived to meet Zack in Houston, even after spending some of the osmium on the new portal.

  After a customary tour of Zack’s house, Spencer packed the extra, newly fabricated teleportation hoop into a rented trailer and hooked it up to Zack’s car, which she then drove for sixteen hours to Aurora, Colorado where PRE-Innovations had rented a storage unit. She built her teleportation hoop inside the unit then made a few round trips to a nearby dumpster until her osmium tank was sufficiently filled. She locked the unit door behind her, booted up the hoop and pressed a button which sent a request to Simon. Eventually, the hoops would be assigned numbers so they could automatically be paired to one another by the exchange on the quantum computer, dialling up the destination teleporter like a telephone. For now, Simon accepted her transfer, and the surface pool appeared in Spencer’s portal, she stepped through and arrived back in Harrogate to the rest of the team.

  “You not visiting your family?” Simon asked as he greeted her.

  “It may only be minutes since I last saw you, but I had a sixteen-hour drive. I’m going to rest up first.”

  “What was the local time when you left?”

  “About two in the morning.”

  “Why did you choose to come back here at the same time you left then? It’s five PM, if you’d have come back at 10 PM yesterday our time, you’d have no time lag, could go straight to bed without changing your routine, and you’d have gained some time back.”

  “Now you point that out to me. I’m knackered, Simon, I’m not at my brightest.”

  “I’ll dial you into 10 PM yesterday.”

  “Cheers, Si.”

  “Done. Take the left portal. If you come back in at nine in the morning, I’ll see you eight hours ago.”

  “That hurts my tired head.” She stepped through the left portal and came back out of the right por
tal sixteen hours earlier.

  “Hey.” The Simon from sixteen hours ago said. “Needing some credit time?”

  “Yep," Spencer replied. “Going home to sleep.”

  “But, you’re already there.”

  “Shit!”

  The earlier version of Spencer was already in her bed at home, she wouldn’t be visiting HQ until nine o'clock the next morning, and she’d leave through the portal to America at five in the afternoon. Until then, there would be two of them in this time and place.

  “I can’t go home and wake her, she needs her beauty sleep," Spencer said. “She might fall asleep at the wheel when she drives to Colorado.”

  “Take my bed. I’ll pull out the cot.”

  “You don’t have to ask me twice," Spencer replied, as she went behind the screened area and collapsed on Simon’s bed.

  She kicked off her shoes, pulled off her jeans and, after some thrashing, managed to find her way under the covers. She fell into a deep sleep within minutes, which might ordinarily have been harder to achieve with the substantial racket that Simon was causing in his state of manic productivity.