alfke.pasa@XEROX.ARPA (08/21/84)
OK, I remember a story (but not the title or author, unfortunately) in which matter transmission had replaced other forms of public transit; i.e. the booths were large and expensive and run by the city (of New York, I believe). This being a public transit system, it of course breaks down one day during rush hour, leaving several dozen people in the process of transmission as it stops. These people find themselves, in the midst of what was normally an instantaneous process, stuck in a limbo (a batch output queue?) with no sensory input. While the repairmen fix the central transceiver (which takes a few hours), the people in the machine find themselves able to communicate telepathically, and during this time a pregnant woman who is being rushed to the hospital gives birth, the child becoming the first person ever to be born "in transit" . . . I read this story in an anthology several years back. I think I have the plot straight, but I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who knows what story this is. Anyway, this seems like a fairly interesting method of matter transmission. Although these people have no bodies at all for several hours, they obviously retain their souls (minds, consciousnesses, whatever) -- so where are the souls stored? Are they "haunting" the machine? Could the souls be "bottled" and put into, say, a memory board? Could the machine be made to put the wrong soul in the wrong body when the body rematerializes? -- Peter Alfke (Alfke.pasa@Xerox.ARPA) (And, if only one person survived the ordeal, would he be the soul survivor? No, but seriously folks . . . )
jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) (08/31/84)
You left out the best part. The matter transmission system didn't just
happen to break down while the pregnant woman was in transit.
It seems the system was heavy into preventing someone getting a free
ride. To that end it not only counted the number of people going into a
booth, it double checked the number when they came out. Due to the
woman giving birth while in transit and a quirk in programing the system
wouldn't let anybody out while the imbalence existed. They finally
solved the problem by having a person go into a booth with no
destination. This compensated for the baby and allowed the "queue" to
empty.
Jerry Aguirre
{hplabs|fortune|idi|ihnp4|ios|tolerant|allegra|tymix}!oliveb!jerry