Weekly Writing – October 14 2023

It was the inevitable conclusion that no one wanted to acknowledge. Copy an object into a matter replicator, and it could be tweaked and reproduced and perfected forever. Nothing produced by the natural world would ever be as perfect as its replica.
Scan a person in one station of a standard-issue teleporter, and everyone had agreed that they should be reconstructed out of the standard-issue matter at another station without any changes whatsoever. Destroy the original simultaneously with the creation of the duplicate to complete the illusion of perfect teleportation, and never touch the blueprint that told station two how tall they should be, how intelligent, what diseases they should carry with them.
Why? Everyone seemed to have decided, at one of those conventions of social etiquette she sometimes imagined they held without her, that it would just introduce too many complications to begin tweaking the human blueprint. Too many conflicting definitions of perfection. But did that really mean they should never try?
Did that mean a person couldn’t try, alone, with only their own physical integrity at stake? There had been no hauling the decommissioned teleporter back home – it was half the size of her apartment and at least as heavy – so she had brought her gear to the travel hub that had been decommissioned along with it. Dehydrated food and an all-climate sleeping bag and all the computing power she could carry on her back. If suicide was a protected right, surely risking her own body for science had to be as well.
But she still hadn’t been naive enough to tell anyone where she was going, or why. There had always been things that had to be discovered in secret before society could stand to look at them in the light. It might take years of trekking back and forth with food and batteries and tweaking the molecules she was made of, but whatever it took, she would drag this one into the light.