But Riker got duplicated, and there were two of him. Not one person split into two parts, but two separate copies of him, both of them were the real one.
David Gerrold once wrote that the transporter was such an extraordinarily advanced technology (paging Dr. Clarke!) that it would be like having an X-ray machine on a Greek trireme.
A transporter joke of the ST science advisors:
Q: How do the Heisenberg compensators work?
A: Very well, thank you!
Great book with a fascinating premise and an interesting near-future society, but alas, a botched ending.
I remember that episode annoying me because of the missed opportunity - Riker was trying to beam up, had problems. A transporter operator locked a second beam on him (!), this second beam got reflected back to the surface while the first managed to break through.
Had the writer been braver, the second beam would have made it through and the first one reflected. Thus, arguably, “Thomas” Riker would have the better claim of being the original.
And for my next trick, I’ll explain how the “Augments” episodes should have ended…
To paraphrase Bryan Ekers, it was a case of writers forced to choose between a good story and scientific plausibility. In the real world, complicated mechanisms often glitch in unforseen and incomprehensible ways.
I know many fans are reluctant to consider Enterprise as canon, but the episode “Daedalus” had the inventor of the transporter in a decades-long quest to bring back his son, who was lost in a transporter accident. If the transporter destroyed the original person and made a copy at the other end, I doubt he would have been obsessed with bringing his son back. He probably would have said, “it was just a duplicate. I’ll make another copy since they’re indistinguishable anyway.”
Similarly, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when the two officers were killed when transporting to the Enterprise, I doubt anyone would have mustered the tears if they were only soulless duplicates. If the person coming out the other end is only a perfect copy, and if that passes for acceptable in the 23rd-24th centuries, then just recreate that person from his pattern, and don’t bother to grieve. So in the Star Trek universe, people must accept that when you are transported, both you and the psychological processes that make you unique are reassembled back into their original molecules, instead of a duplicate made from whatever molecules happen to be there.
I just got done re-watching that story arc - I’m interested in reading your thoughts.
(Funny how when “hearing” thoughts is transposed to “reading” thoughts, the connotation is mind-reading)
That drove me nuts-shouldn’t each ‘Riker’ have been 50% of the mass of the ‘original’? Or does the transporter create matter to fill in the missing bits? [geekhat] Noooooo!!![/gh] 
There was a short story I mentioned here a while back, about a mysterious large cube on the Moon. Each astronaut sent to investigate it was killed by some sort of trap. The people in charge of the project see that if an astronaut duplicates moves that didn’t get the previous one killed, he could advance a little farther. But this was costly. So one astronaut was chosen to be ‘backed-up’ on disc. He would be transported to the cube, get a certain distance, and be killed horribly. The information he gained before his death was given to the ‘back-up’, who made it a little farther, and so on… Eventually a copy made it through.
I tried searching for it, but didn’t turn up anything.
I think one of the examples the OP gave was making yourself younger. So for example I’m 37. I hope on the transporter and boom I’m now 18.
To answer the OP, those incidences all came from malfunctions. How could you replicate EXACTLY the malfunction?
Remember that the planet he was being transported off of had some sort of subspace maguffin field that made it impossible to get down to the planet once the field came into full strength. Assume that the 180 lbs of duplo-Riker’s mass came from the atmospheric energy.
Please if you’re going to complain about a nitpick, at least *try *to fanwank it first.
Given that every time we’ve seen transporter duplication (Kirk and the space poodle in TOS) body modification (Pulaski in Next Gen) or blending (Tuvok and Neelix in Voyager) along with any others that I’ve forgotten, there has apparently been no significant alteration in mass (except Tuvix was IIRC a bit heftier than either of his constituents, but not apparently equal to the mass of both combined) I would fanwank that yes, the transporter taps into the “matter stream” (as seen in the TNG ep “Realm of Fear”) to create sufficient matter to rebuild the duplicate to the proper mass. Similarly, in an instance where a duplicate is merged or an adult reduced to child size, the transporter shunts the excess matter off into the matter stream.
Wait, I thought the “matter stream” was just the pathway the matter converted to energy/information took between dematerialisation and rematerialisation, rather than an alternate dimension (which I think is what you’re suggesting).
That would presuppose the existence of a soul and that it would be detectable in some way (or has some physical effect on a person).
If a copy is made that is identical in everyway to you, with your memories up to the point of its generation, how would it differ from you?
Similarly, if you were to irrevocably wipe someone’s memory, it would in essence be no different to killing that person.
Dude.
Fanwank.
Work with me here.
Also brought in in the aforementioned “Spock Must Die!” One of the Spocks answers a question before the other one does, and the other Spock points out that this is proof that even their short time as separate entities has caused divergences, otherwise the second Spock would have answered simultaneously with and identically to the first.
I vaguely recall an old Star Trek novel called The Price of the Phoenix where the villain devised a version of the transporter that would beam him away and rematerialize him perfectly healthy if he was killed; the “Phoenix Effect”. I don’t recall it being that good, but I did like the scene where he rendered Kirk unconscious, and when he woke up there were two Kirks. He told them that it was up to them to guess which was the original - unless, of course, he’d killed the original and both were duplicates.
It also had a sequel, The Fate of the Phoenix. I remember reading them several times and thinking they were pretty good, if a bit confusing. IIRC there ended up being a duplicate Spock as well (with a twist). Also it featured the Romulan commander from the TOS episode “The Enterprise Incident.”
I believe the story you’re referring to is Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys.
That is exactly it. I don’t know why I can never remember the title.
Had I written it, the Augments would’ve done something particularly sadistic and egregious and been chortling about their superiority when T’Pol stands up and walks toward them, very grim and angry. The leader Aug sneers at her and gives a nod to one of his guys, who steps forward and throws a punch at her. She casually catches his fist and with a hard blow of the heel of her hand, breaks his arm in a fully blatant “that boy’s got too many corners!” kind of way. He screams, falls, she advances and other Augments attack her. She takes punches but shrugs them off and just massacres them in the furiously methodical manner that tanks assume when rolling over human skulls - no martial arts, no wire-fighting, just sledgehammer punches punctuated with screams of fury. She catches the leader, injures him, and gives a brief speech about Vulcan went through this same “augment” phase thousands of years earlier and how it made them even more aggressive and warlike and put them on the verge of self-extinction when the prophet Surak showed them the price they’d have to pay to survive - strict emotional control. Logic isn’t something the Vulcans embrace for the hell of it, nor just to annoy humans, despite the egocentric way they take offense. This Augment, who assumed he was the inevitable conqueror of the Universe, needed a harsh reminder that the Universe has seen his kind before and has a way of self-correcting such as him out of existence. Nothing he can do or even imagine doing hasn’t been done before.
Archer and/or Tucker try to stop her, but she shrugs them off and kill the Augment, and I mean really kills him, savagely brutal, and runs a violent emotional spectrum from fury to laughter to tears as she pounds the Augment’s lifeless body, eventually stopping to look at her shaking injured exhausted hands, marked in red and green stripes that mark his blood and her own. She spends a week in isolation and meditation and an unease lasting the rest of the series (or at least the rest of the season) develops between her and the human crew members, especially Tucker - they’d started to treat her and view her as one of them, but she is not one of them. She, and by extension her entire species, is but one of the mysterious dangers humans will have to deal with and adapt to as they try to establish themselves in the universe, a universe that will very casually and mercilessly destroy the arrogant and careless. For her part, T’Pol must pull herself together - she’d started to think of the humans as her peers but they are not her peers. Dealing with them, trying to equate herself to them, exposes her to the risk of unraveling the tenuous grip she has on her self-control, such control having shown itself necessary to the survival of her species.
It’s now impossible for Archer and Tucker (and the audience) to ignore that though she looks somewhat human, she is an alien being, with an alien culture and an alien history, one so violent that the savageries humans talk about (and even boast about) seem trivial by comparison. A late conversation in the episode is between Archer and Tucker, with the former having quickly read up about Vulcan’s various pre-Surak wars and commenting that there’s always someone better than you, and always someone worse, and humans have to tread lightly. The final scene is (as I believe it was in the actual episode) Arik Soong thinking that perhaps it’s time to abandon biology - the future is cybernetics. He hasn’t learned. Humans never really will.