Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

In a city this size, a dozen or so beaming errors a year were acceptable.

In each gigantic waystation structure, the building blocks of life were kept in vats and tubs. There were huge enclosed swimming pools filled with chromosomes and proteins and cell juice. Vast, layered skin farms were rotated underneath mile-long sunlamp tubes on the upper levels.

Each facility jutted up like an architect’s dying wish on the outskirts of the major cities. They were effectively airports in a universe that had done away with air travel.

Those initial millennia of colonization were tortuous but this was the new age. All was well. To travel between the stars no longer required a spaceship.

It was found that information could be pushed faster than light while mass could not. Coded streams of electrons could be bent around the straightness of space. We made paper airplanes out of the impossible.

A person was put, naked, shivering and afraid, into a bathtub cubicle chamber on one end. The lid was closed and the dissassemblers were let in. It was fast acting acid swamped with tiny nanos that took the person apart piece by piece while recording every bit of it.

They always screamed. It was painful.

The nanos were set on ‘record’ as they tore the person apart. That information was coded into a hardbase of data which was then threaded onto an electron batch. With a focused squirt, the person’s breakdown was sent to his or her destination.

It went behind the closets of the universe, in between the cracks.

It was received seconds later by one of the mentioned white structures outside the destination city.

There, using the building blocks available, they put the coded instructions into a machine, set them to ‘reverse’, and then hit play.

It was like watching a film of melting wax being run backwards.

The person was re-built without the last ten agonizing minutes of memory from the breakdown process. The rebuilding took weeks.

Angela’s electron burst must have skirted a star because she woke up skinless, missing her legs, six of her fingers and a fair portion of her brain.

She never fully recovered. They did what they could but humans were still a little hit and miss when it came to creating people from scratch with no nanorecords.

She was taken care of wonderfully in the basements of the building. Her relatives signed waivers and become richer. She learned a few words of English to communicate. She never got the hang of her new fingers and legs. She died happily in a diaper five years later.

In a city this size, a dozen or so beaming errors a year were acceptable.

 

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