The future. We have the technology to transfer matter by energy beams, though it seems a cruel parody of the star-trek transporter so optimistically fantasised in the middle of the 20th century.

Colloquially known as ‘faxing’, transmatter allows travel at the speed of light but for the most part is useful only for solid objects (not even liquids). Nevertheless, for transport to most planets, it is economically viable when the alternative is years of spaceflight.

Human transmat travel has an overhead of 3 months and begins and ends with a stay in hospital. It involves being cryogenically frozen, then destructively scanned, the data transmitted to the destination, then being reconstructed at the remote location. In fact ‘replicated’ is more accurate than ‘reconstructed’ as the traveller at the destination contains none of his original atoms.

In rare circumstances, impurities in the replication area react with the as-yet ‘unsealed’ replica. Usually this takes the form of slight oxidisation of the construction face, a surface that will be internal to the subject, carrying an increased risk of cancer. This of course is played down by governments and transmat companies alike, citing that travelling by transmat is safer than a year’s city living from the point of view of cancer risk.

Rarer still, communication is lost and the process has to be ‘wound back’. The traveller ends up back at their point of origin with some of their original matter and some reconstructed. This carries a great risk of death or life-threatening illness or malformity, and is traumatic for the staff at the receiving station as they end up with a partially-constructed human to dispose of.

There is a market in ‘plexing’ where illegal receiving stations tap the transmission and create a duplicate of the payload. This gave rise to a lucrative black market in celebrity doppelgangers for sexual purposes. Besides the appalling sex trade, plexing of humans is illegal since there is no way to tell one doppelganger from the other. Transmissions of humans are encrypted but if the stakes are high enough the security measures can be circumvented by organised criminal groups.

When cases of human plexing do arise, through error or criminal intent, society is left with the issue of accommodating the extra person at short notice, as if they are an asylum seeker with no country of origin. The copy at the intended point of destination (”the traveller”) maintains their identity and the other copy or copies (”dupes”) are registered as new citizens. In theory, the traveller should provide for maintenance of the dupes until they are independent. In practice, legal wranglings can get extremely difficult, as all copies believe themselves to be the original and will even resort to murderous measures to hold onto their original identity. DNA evidence is useless as the two individuals are really identical. Fortunately accidental plexing is very uncommon, and in the black market case, the dupe is normally so changed by their experience that they are effectively a different individual by the time they are recovered and ready for integration back into society.

Transmission and reception of humans takes place amid tight security, as many religious groups view faxing humans as sacrilegious. The Duplexing Problem raises tricky questions about the soul. In the simple transmission case, the soul apparently somehow travels to the destination, but duplexing appears to conclusively show that the soul is simply an illusion brought about by the aggregate of the mechanical, chemical and electrical processes in the body - otherwise how could it be duplicated? This has not been answered to the satisfaction of Christian, Muslim or Jewish fundamentalists, thus the national transmat stations are hotspots for protest and even terrorist action.

Transmat is plagued by public relations setbacks. Apart from the religious and ethical issues of human transmat (in colloquial use, “dupe” has come to mean cheap whore or sex slave: “your momma was a dupe”), the technical shortcomings do not sit well with the public’s view of what’s really occuring. For example, no matter is actually transmitted, only data enabling the correct molecular reconstruction. If the target station is missing some component, reconstruction is not possible, so for example, you cannot simply fax air to planets with no atmosphere. The lay public does not really understand this and imagines transmat of supplies to be the ultimate solution to all galactic logistics and humanitarian problems.

Regarding human transmat, the public simply cannot stomach the technical truth that humans are destroyed and recreated when transmatted, and the popular illusion is that the actual molecules of the person are streamed through the ether to the destination. This is a fragile illusion, and this fragility is part of the reason plexing is illegal and dupes are so stigmatized.