Vessel

Mark’s body crumpled to the floor. It was an odd sensation. Not the falling but watching himself from a distance and still feeling some of the impact of his body against the floor. It felt different from experiencing it within his body. It felt softer. He might not have known what happened, except that he was watching his body fall, and the sensations coincided with what he saw.

Equally as weird was the recognition that the eyes of his body remained shut, but he was able to see, let alone with a third-person perspective. The colors everywhere were so vibrant, and lines and edges were so sharp and defined. Such visual clarity surprised him. He marveled in his ability to see all around him, wherever he was since he was obviously not in his body, which lay on the floor several feet away.

“That didn’t go as planned.” The voice was his colleague, Garrett. His voice projected more loudly and with more inflection than usual. He saw Garrett at the console still. “Is he okay?”

Margaret opened the enclosure for the target pad and leaned over his body, blocking his view of it. “He’s breathing.” She held his wrist. “He has a pulse.” Her voice also resonated with expanded cadences.

Mark tried to tell them he was in the room and aware, but no sound came from him, although Margaret flinched like she had received a shock.

“Sorry, he just gave a big breath that startled me.”

Intriguing, thought Mark. I wonder how much control I have over my body from here. Can I move?

He tried and found that he could move, even though he saw no limbs propelling or carrying him, and his body remained in a heap on the floor. He, whatever he was, just kind of floated along gliding through the transparent housing of the transmission pad without resistance.

Cool, he thought, I can pass through walls.

Mark did not believe that humans had souls, but this experience was challenging that belief. He wondered if he was simply a disembodied mind, but his body appeared to be functioning as expected if unconscious or asleep. He deduced, therefore, that his mind and body were still connected. So, whatever he was must be a will or soul or something like that. He would have to do more research in metaphysics and see what he could find. For now, though, he just wanted to be joined back together again.

Margaret was still leaning over his body, checking other vital signs. Mark approached and passed through Margaret to enter his body. Margaret shivered and let out a gasp. She jumped.

“I felt him!” she exclaimed.

Mark rejoined his body, and once recoupled, stood up.

Margaret glared at him and slapped his arm. “What just happened? What was that all about?”

Mark’s body felt a little fatigued, but his mind was racing. He turned to Garrett. “I was here the whole time, just disassociated. I didn’t realize that could even happen.”

Garrett clicked away on a keyboard. Mark reasoned he was taking notes on the computer. He paused and looked up. “Tell me what you experienced.”

Margaret ran sensors along his body and angled her head toward Garrett as she spoke. “Everything is checking out okay. It’s definitely him. His body’s stressed a bit, but other than that, he’s healthy.”

“It’s me,” concurred Mark, “although for a moment, my body was here, and my mind or soul or some consciousness of me was still over on the transmission pad. Everything looked intense and radiant.” He shook his head. “So, I guess we aren’t ready to roll out the teleporter for public use yet.”

Garrett’s lips pursed and his brow furrowed. “I wasn’t expecting that yet, anyway, but this is definitely a setback we didn’t expect.”

“I’d say,” agreed Mark. “I guess there really is more to a person than a body.”

“We knew that.” Margaret stepped away and shrugged. “I assumed the mind and soul and everything else were intimately joined to the body so would teleport along together.” Margaret had argued for the existence of the soul, but Mark had not listened. “Now we know that is not the case. It’s not a failure. We’ve just learned that we have more to learn.”

Garrett completed his keyboard clacking and shook his head. “I wonder how it’s all connected then. I really felt Penrose’s theory of consciousness originating from quantum processes within brain neurons held the key, but there must be more to it than that.”

Mark silently considered his options. He walked back to the enclosure of the transmission pad. “Let’s give it another try.” Before Margaret and Garrett could object, he said, “Look, we’re close. If I get separated again, I know how to get myself back together. Margaret checked and saw that I’m fine. We can run another trial, tweak the parameters a bit, and see if we can get this to work.”

“Absolutely not,” insisted Garrett. He stepped from behind the console. “This is not simply a matter of tweaking parameters. We don’t really understand what we’re doing now.”

“I think we do.” Mark stepped inside and onto the transmission pad. “Like you both have said, we are an integrated entity in some way. I was able to get myself back together by just floating my consciousness over until it lay on my body. I didn’t have to do anything else. I reconnected on my own without any further thought or action.”

Garrett and Margaret exchanged a look. Mark knew how to interpret when they were not swayed. He was glad once more that he had convinced them early on that he would get to decide when to do trials. He had the vision and a lot of the knowledge. He certainly had the gumption.

Mark directed Garrett back behind the console. “Try capturing a broader bandwidth of energy.” Garrett nodded. Margaret returned to her spot outside the target pad. “And when you transmit, let’s try splitting the energy and reconstructing the matter in phases.”

Garrett turned his head to the side. “We talked about this. I don’t believe it is safe to parse the matter-energy beam like that.” He stared directly at Mark. “You are a complete entity. If something breaks the beam in mid-transmission, we could only restore part of you, and that won’t do.”

“Trust me.” Mark returned Garrett’s stare and smiled. “Yes, I know we did not anticipate what just happened, but the physics is sound, and nature is resilient. It tends toward structure.”

“Nature tends toward chaos,” remarked Garrett. “Second Law of Thermodynamics.” He clicked the keyboard and sighed. “I’m doing what you asked.”

Mark felt power surge through him again as his matter transformed into energy and transferred across the room. When he sensed the air again, he took a deep breath. His vision returned, and he saw…his body on the target pad again. This time, it remained standing and stared ahead. He, whatever he was, was outside his body once more.

But, no! When Mark looked down, he saw his chest, arms, hands, legs. He was still standing on the transmission pad.

Garrett let out an expletive. Margaret’s head swiveled back and forth between the two enclosures. She took a step toward the target pad and then stopped.

“All right, this is bad.” Mark stepped off the transmission pad and out of the enclosure.

“Is this a clone?” asked Margaret, her hair coming out of her tight bun. “Did we just create a clone of you?”

“Why is it just standing there?” Garrett walked away from the console and joined Margaret. “Is it alive?”

Mark approached the target pad and reached out a tentative hand to the exact copy of his body. He touched the arm. It felt like an arm that belonged to another person. The body did not react but continued staring ahead, standing with a relaxed stance. Mark noticed the slight rise of the chest and assumed that the body was breathing.

“It seems alive,” answered Mark. “Let me think.”

Mark closed his eyes and concentrated. If this body was also his, and if only one could house whatever else he was, could he float between the two? Since he knew what that felt like, he decided to try it. He willed himself to float and watched as he rose above his head. He drifted the foot or so over to the other body and descended into it. When he opened his eyes, he was standing on the target pad staring ahead.

“I think it worked.”

Garrett and Margaret both jerked.

Margaret gasped. “Did you just…? I don’t even know what to ask.”

Mark turned his head and saw his body, the one he had vacated, standing in the entryway to the enclosure. It blocked his path. He reached out and grabbed the shoulders of the body, and with a light nudge, was able to direct it out of his way. Instead of falling, the body took a step back and then righted itself. It stayed where positioned and kept a vacant look.

“We’re not doing any more trials,” Garrett insisted.

“No, that’s fine,” agreed Mark. He stared at his vacant, first body. “It’s like it has all the autonomic motor functions but no volition.”

“This is creepy.” Margaret inspected both of Mark’s bodies. “Both of you are healthy, just stressed like the first trial.” She ceased her examination. “Are they both you?”

That gave Mark an idea. He closed his eyes to concentrate again. This time, he did not will to move from one body to the next but instead tried to overlay this aspect of himself over both bodies. He opened his eyes.

He was staring into both sets of eyes, which startled him. He took a step back, and both bodies moved away from each other one step. “Okay, this is unnerving.” Both voices spoke. He raised his right arm and extended it in front of himself and then grasped his two right hands together. He sensed his right hand shaking someone’s hand.

Garrett grabbed both of his bodies, and he felt a hand on each of his shoulders. “Mark, stop it. We have no concept of what this could do to you.”

Garrett’s voice reverberated in his ears. He instinctively turned his head toward Garrett, but only one head actually rotated that way, while the other turned away. This caused his vision to bifurcate, and he began to feel a headache swiftly overtaking him. He shook off Garrett’s hands, closed his eyes, and swiveled his heads back. The sensation of pain receded.

Mark found that if he concentrated, he could direct more of his attention to one body or the other. He kept his eyes closed but thought about raising one body’s arm and placing it on the other shoulder. When he felt his right arm raise and reach out to touch his left shoulder, not across his body, he knew he had accomplished what he hoped.

Mark resumed control of only one of his bodies, his original body, and opened his eyes. He reached out with his newfound ability and was able to sense his other body. “I think I have them both under control. It’s going to take some practice, though. I should only inhabit one for now.”

Margaret let out a snort. “What are we supposed to do now? We can’t leave a body of you here, and it’s going to look suspicious having two of you walking around the building.”

Garrett exhaled deeply, and his face looked pale. “We need to stay focused.” He walked back behind the console. “Our project is about teleportation, not cloning.”

Mark chuckled. “A lot of advancements in history were discovered accidentally. I believe we can still develop real teleportation, and we can throw cloning into the mix.”

“Are you crazy?” Garrett glared at Mark from behind the console. “We have no idea of the ethical dilemmas of…making full-grown copies of you. Cloning technology has always focused on growing a new body from birth using the same genetic material from a source body, not a…duplicated, adult body.”

“I think we need to do more research before proceeding further,” added Margaret.

Before Mark could respond, a thunderous clap resounded in the room. Mark felt a malevolent presence grasp him and recoiled. He watched the head of his vacant body snap up and open its eyes, a feral intelligence behind them. It spoke.

“An empty vessel.” It leered and turned to look at Garrett and the console. “Is this a teleportation device? It is primitive, but it will do. Do you know its range?”

“I…do you mean…what?” Garrett stuttered. His head swung from one Mark to the other.

Mark closed his eyes and tried to reenter his other body and force out the interloper. He was painfully rebuffed and crumpled to the ground. He rubbed his forehead as he watched.

“You are a child at possession,” said the presence from the other body. “Do not attempt that again, or I will show you the meaning of eternal pain.”

Mark’s other body stepped toward the console and Garrett. Margaret stepped in its way. It knocked her aside, moved behind the console and confronted Garrett.

“I need you to retrieve something for me,” Mark’s other body said.

Garrett quailed. “We’ve hardly tested it. It only works between those two pads.” He pointed at each, and Mark noticed his arm was unsteady.

The body pulled Garrett and tossed him aside. It began typing on the keyboard of the console. A low hum began emanating from the target pad.

“This is too primitive,” growled the presence. “It uses quantum tunneling so the entanglement should reach beyond the observable universe, but it is not boosted sufficiently. The telemetry is barely enough to transmit a simple extended body. You can only retrieve an object from a few meters away.” Mark watched the mouth and nose on his other body curl into a demeaning sneer. The entity looked straight at him. “But perhaps I can send something further.”

Mark felt the malevolent entity enter him and compel him toward the transmission pad. His other body clicked away at the keyboard. Mark could still see and hear, but he could not control his arms or legs. The transmission enclosure began to whine, and the pad glowed with ominous ruddy heat.

Garrett grabbed onto Mark to keep him from entering the transmission enclosure. Mark felt the presence want to strike at Garrett with his arm, but he fought to keep his arm down. His legs yearned to step up to the transmission pad.

Margaret pulled at the arms of Mark’s other body. The pressure in Mark diminished as his other body grabbed Margaret around the torso and held a hand around her neck.

“Do as I say, or I kill this one?”

This is ridiculous, thought Mark. It’s my body.

He clenched his mind and concentrated on his other body. This was distracting enough for Margaret to break free, grab a pair of scissors from the desktop, and ram them into the side of Mark’s other neck.

Mark’s other body raged and screamed, and Mark felt a sharp pain in his own neck. His knees buckled, but Garrett held him up. The other body removed the scissors from its neck. It took one sharp breath and hissed.

“Lord Samyaza, we are close. I will find a way!” The body collapsed on the floor in a pool of blood.

Mark felt the presence leave. He took a deep breath, which cleared his head, and stood on his own. He nodded when Garrett released him. Garrett suggested that Mark and Margaret visit a doctor, but they declined.

“What was that?” asked Margaret. “What do we do with,” she pointed at Mark’s other body, “that?”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Mark. “You two go home. Whatever that was, I believe it’s gone for now. We’ll take a few days away and regroup later.”

“Are you calling off the project?” asked Garrett.

“No.” Mark shook his head. “But to Margaret’s earlier point, we need to do more research. We’re obviously missing something important about what happens.”

They straightened and tidied the room. Garrett remained quiet and left first. Margaret gave Mark a hug and then followed. Mark called security, explained that their experiment produced a duplicate copy of him that tried to kill them. He knew that sounded strange but given the top-secret nature of their project, he trusted the government to clean up after them with discretion. There would be meetings, but Mark knew how to navigate those.

On his way home, Mark kept thinking about the new possibilities he had never imagined. Immediate clones that could be controlled collectively. Mysterious, intelligent entities that could inhabit bodies. That presence called out to a Lord Samyaza; Mark would have to investigate that name to see what he could find out. His project was crossing more frontiers than predicted, and he planned to use the experiences today to be better prepared for what was coming.