The Teleporter Fraud: Why Instant Travel is a Suicide Booth with Better PR

    Imagine a world without airports. No more security theater, no more overpriced water, no more sharing recycled air with a man who thinks a hacking cough is a personality trait. In its place stands the Teleporter: a sleek, humming platform that promises to whisk you from New York to Tokyo in the shimmering blink of an eye. It’s the ultimate expression of human convenience, a triumph of technology over the tyranny of distance.

It’s also a murder machine with a brilliant marketing department.

     We’ve all been sold the fantasy, but nobody wants to read the fine print. They don’t call it the “Molecular Disassembly and Atomic Reconstruction Chamber,” do they? No, because that sounds terrifying and nobody would get in the fucking thing. They call it a “teleporter.” It sounds clean. Instantaneous. Magical.

    But let’s not get swept up in the branding. Let’s be engineers of our own existential dread for a moment and walk through what this device actually does. It’s a brutal, three-step process.

Step 1: The Perfect Forgery (COPY)

     You step onto the platform. A beam of light, or some other sci-fi nonsense, scans you atom for atom. It creates a perfect, high-fidelity blueprint of your entire being. It records everything: the exact position of every molecule, the precise electrical state of every neuron in your brain, the half-digested burrito in your colon, and the nagging, abstract fear that you left the oven on.

    What has this machine just done? It has made a COPY. A flawless digital file of you. Not you, but a perfect set of instructions for building another you.

Step 2: The Silent Execution (DELETE)

    Here’s the part the travel brochures conveniently omit. The machine on the other end, in Tokyo, is about to start building a new you from a vat of spare carbon, hydrogen, and other assorted elements. But the original you, the handsome, one-of-a-kind schmuck standing on the platform in New York, can’t just be allowed to walk off. That would be messy. Bad for the census, terrible for your marriage.

So, the machine has to get rid of the original.

    It has to turn you into a cloud of disorganized energy. It has to shred your physical form. It has to delete the source file. There is no gentle fade to white, no final thought. It is the cold, instantaneous cessation of your existence. You don’t go anywhere. You just stop.

Step 3: The Flawless Impostor (PASTE)

    Simultaneously, the machine in Tokyo receives the blueprint and gets to work. It assembles a perfect replica, atom for atom, based on the scan. This new person materializes on the platform feeling fine. In fact, they feel a continuous existence. 

    They remember stepping onto the platform in New York. They have all your memories, your anxieties, your hopes, and your sudden craving for a burrito. They think they just “traveled.”

    But they didn’t. They were just born. They are a brand new person with a used set of memories. The person who stepped onto the platform in New York is a puff of vapor. They’re dead.

    A teleporter is simply a suicide booth that spits out a perfect clone of you somewhere else.

    The sheer speed of the process is the ultimate deception. It happens so fast that you don’t have time to contemplate the philosophical horror of it all. The copy who arrives on the other side has no idea they are a copy. They are the perfect, self-unaware impostor, ready to go about your life, sleep with your spouse, and pay your taxes, never knowing that the original protagonist of their story was unceremoniously executed for their convenience.

Who mourns the original you? No one. Because no one even knows they’re gone.

    This is the terrifying bargain of the teleporter. It’s the ultimate convenience: you get to skip the flight, and you don’t even have to be there for your own death. And the scariest part isn’t the technology itself. It’s the certainty that people would line up for it, that we would willingly trade our own, singular existence for a shorter commute.

     So the next time you dream of instant travel, ask yourself: are you willing to die for it? Because the machine is ready, and it never asks twice.