The Complete Thoughts of a USS Enterprise Red Shirt as He Lay Dying on Janus IV.
So, This is it. Fhuuuuck.
I am being killed by a damn Horta. Something that looks like you’d scrape it off a pizza stone Sunday morning after the kegger. I didn’t know what a Horta even was 30 minutes ago, and now it’s ending me.
“Join Starfleet” they said. “See the galaxy” they said. Next thing you know they’re beaming me to a very borderline class M rock without even a cursory attempt at body armor or even decent hiking boots, just this cursed shirt.
And it’s itchy.
You know, come to think of it, I beamed down here. There’s a literal map of me, from like, 30 minutes ago, up there in the transporter buffer. A perfectly good me. An un-Horta’d me. A me that still doesn’t know what a Horta even is, except Portuguese for “salad.” A me that’s still without regrets. A me that still has its whimsy and positive outlook.
Guys! Just beam me up, reassemble me — and it will be like none of this BS even happened. It’ll be like I never even left for frikkin’… what’s this backwater called again? Oh yeah, frikkin’ Janus IV.
(By the way, you would not believe how painful disintegration is. It’s like a charley horse that starts at your balls and radiates out to your fingernails. Or like if your whole skeleton was getting a root canal. Just FYI.)
Wait. Holy shit.
You don’t even actually need my body, right? Any mass that’s convertible to energy will do. Energy is energy. E always equals E. I mean, this is middle school Einstein stuff. So anything will work. That rock, this useless tricorder and that 2-liter of Tab Spock likes to drink. Then boom, I’m back. Party’s back on for Saturday.
Wait, hold up…
That means…anyone who’s used the transporter can be reassembled from any matter. Anyone. Dead Lieutenant Latimer, on Taurus II. Or Dead Reyburn. Or Dead Mathews! Crap, they’re probably still in there somewhere in that thing, still in this itchy shirt and everything. Waiting to be rebuilt from a perfectly good dataset and some old copies of Esquire! We could get the band back together! I gotta tell somebody! But here I am in mid-disintegration. Latimer. Man, I miss that guy. Ol’ Tribble-pants Latimer. Probably still transporter-buffered with the rest of them.
Or are they?
Who makes the decision to clear the transporter buffer? Scottie? Spock? Kyle! Lieutenant effin’ Kyle? That bootlicking kissup? And when? Is it a nightly purge? Or am I gonna sit in some Windows-Vista-looking recycle bin until the drive fills up?
Why has no one thought of this before? I mean we can make a damn cheeseburger out of thin air in the mess hall. This is just an unfathomable lapse in human imagination. And who’s paying for it with their lives? Not the gold shirts, not the blue shirts. Typical.
Huh.
Speaking of shirts… how does the transporter know my shirt is a shirt and not just more of… me? And if I rip my shirt (god, Kirk loves that play) on …Ceti Alpha Something, why isn’t it good as new automatically when I’m beamed up? Or if I shit my pants — and believe you me, it’s the first thing that happens when a Horta kills you I’ll tell you that — is that fecal matter restored to its …original location?
And, what if, hypothetically, I get shot in the face by some space flower that turns me into a dirty hippie on Omicron Ceti III, couldn’t the transporter beam-up just cure me automatically, because of the absence of space flower hippie venom in my buffered bodymap? Could it not fix my liver after too much of that nasty-ass green brandy? Or heck, cure any form any disease? An STD from Omicron Ceti III? (Kirk, my dude…)
Or hell, I’ll admit it. I’m starting to thin a little on top, nothing too serious, but my girlfriend has noticed. Boom. Just revert to a fuller head of hair from the recent past. Or drop a few LBs by reverting to your transporter buffer map before the pizza party happened. (They can make calzones out of thin air, but not leave out the calories? “Advanced species” my sweet patoot.)
Okay.
Now I’m suddenly concered that some merry band of transporter engineers went to a hell of a lot of extra trouble to make sure an identical malady or wound or even my death is transferred to my buffer image because… reasons? It’s somehow more fair? And who paid for those research hours? Now I’m actually apoplectic. This seems stupid, cruel and unnecessary now. That mess hall cheeseburger has more rights than me now?
Come to think of it… how do we know we’ve even gone where no man has gone before if the state of our brains remains exactly what it was when we were read into the buffer in the first place? Do we learn what we did from the reports we filed from the planet’s surface? And can we really believe those reports if our brains, now reassembled, did not technically experience the planet firsthand? Hell, did this even happen? Did anyplace we ever beamed down to even really even exist? Is this whole Starfleet thing a facade? A big, complex grift of our tax credits?
(I’m starting to feel lightheaded, actually…)
And why am I just realizing all this now? As I lay dying. Killed by an sentient overcooked omelet, poor mission planning and bad design. I should have paid more attention in Academy. Gotten my degree. But “security officer jobs pay the big bucks.”
Staring into the void.
F–
