Has this Star Trek plot ever been made into a story?

[Tuckerfan]

@Saint Cad

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?

Holodeck, dude! Seriously, though, you’re going to want to replicate the malfunction because if there is some kind of prohibition of turning out unlimited copies of yourself, you need to know how that screw up happened so you can keep the machine from doing it again.

[cochrane]

@Szlater

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?

<snip>

Because in the ST universe, it is you. It is not a copy. That is Star Trek canon. To fanwank it, the designers of the transporter have traced every path a molecule takes when being transported and have satisfactorily established they are the original molecules. I realize that other cultures besides the Federation have the transporter and were using them before humans, but any ethical society would determine that a person has not been destroyed and recreated from a different batch of molecules in order to certify it for use by intelligent life forms. It does not work otherwise in the Star Trek universe. It may work differently in other science fiction stories, but let’s leave the philosophical and spiritual questions for those franchises that make allowances for them. In Star Trek, the transporter does not make copies. Tom Riker is an exception. But otherwise, you go through the transporter unchanged, except for a brief period when your molecules are disassembled and reassembled.

[RealityChuck]

James Patrick Kelly’s short story “Think Like a Dinosaur” deals with the issue of the transporter.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Come to think of it, Worf once suffered a serious spinal-cord injury and paralysis, and tried to commit ritual Klingon suicide before the Starfleet medicos replaced his spine using transporter technology. Yeesh. :rolleyes:

[Otto]

Using a variant of replicator technology, actually.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

::looking it up::

Right you are. Thanks.

[Malacandra]

@Der Trihs

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.

There’s a rather good Wikipedia article on this book, although I see some talentless hack scribbled over it a few weeks ago. The (unsigned-in) revision in May 2006 pretty much gave the definitive lowdown on this slightly obscure novel.

“He/him” is a little nonspecific. The villain, Omne, created a duplicate Kirk using the supposed death of the original as cover and to use the recreated Kirk as a lever against Spock and the Federation. It was revealed a little later that the presumably-original Kirk was still about the place - at any rate, that Kirk bore injuries consistent with his recent history, and claimed never to have even lost consciousness, which Spock claimed no Kirk, even a duplicate, would ever lie about.

The sequel featured some more Phoenix shenanigans, such as Omne creating a duplicate of a living person out of mischief, and himself creating a duplicate of Spock’s body for a copy of his own (Omne’s) personality to inhabit.

[Otto]

@Elendil's Heir

::looking it up::

Right you are. Thanks.

Not that the notion of replicating a spine is any less outlandish. But perhaps not as outlandish as holographic lungs…

[Cervaise]

Nice summary, Ekers. Too bad that show never had the balls do anything like that. (Yeah, I watched every episode.)

@Annie

That drove me nuts-shouldn’t each ‘Riker’ have been 50% of the mass of the ‘original’?

Mass conversion is highly inconsistent. I mean, in “Relics,” when Scotty came out of the transporter, it looks like the machine tried to make two or three of him.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Cervaise

…Mass conversion is highly inconsistent. I mean, in “Relics,” when Scotty came out of the transporter, it looks like the machine tried to make two or three of him.

I always suspected that the other guy wasn’t lost to signal degradation so much as Scotty drawing off his mass, a little bit at a time, over all those years…

[cochrane]

@Cervaise

Nice summary, Ekers. Too bad that show never had the balls do anything like that. (Yeah, I watched every episode.)

Mass conversion is highly inconsistent. I mean, in “Relics,” when Scotty came out of the transporter, it looks like the machine tried to make two or three of him.

Ahh yes, conversion into an energy stream for 75 years can be rougher on a person than even a wee bout o’ shore leave.

[Otto]

@Cervaise

Mass conversion is highly inconsistent. I mean, in “Relics,” when Scotty came out of the transporter, it looks like the machine tried to make two or three of him.

Yet still didn’t replace his finger.