Suicide Box

My editor asked me to do a piece on teleporters.

I thought “That sounds pretty boring.” Everybody uses them, right? What’s to tell?

A long time ago, people used to worry about the implications. The whole suicide box thing.

“If a copy-me gets created and this-me gets destroyed, doesn’t that mean I died?”

Real Ship of Theseus, Philosophy 101 shit.

And everybody kept bringing up The Prestige. It got very tiresome. It’s not even Nolan’s best film.

I mean, hell, Memento exists!

Anyway, there were a few hold outs—luddites, amish types, you know, same as anything.

But once people realized they could skip their daily two hour commute, they were all in.

When cars were first made, there were concerns that the human body couldn’t handle speeds over 35 MPH. There was a panic that you’d turn to mush right in there in the Model-T. And later on, there was outcry over pollution and land loss from all the roads, health concerns over no one walking anymore, yadda yadda.

But nobody stopped using cars because they were fast and convenient, and eventually you were just expected to have one. So fears about safety, health, the environment—that all went out the window.

And hey, that’s just the way the world works. Tough tits.

So everybody uses teleporters. What was there to write about?

It turns out, there’s this online community. It’s been growing day by day. It gains a thousand members every hour.

This community is convinced that teleporters are suicide boxes and, on top of that, they’re avid users.

Some of these people teleport a hundred times a day with nowhere to go. Just phasing for the hell of it.

So, I asked one of these guys, for the story right, I asked him, “If you think it kills you, why do you do it?”

And you know what he says to me?

He says, “I want to kill myself but I don’t want to hurt my family. I want to kill myself but I don’t want to suffer the consequences.”

And that’s when I knew I had a story. Ω