Inversion - 3

Laurel woke on his couch at noon, neck cramped and mouth tasting of copper. The equations from the night before blazed in his memory with perfect clarity, each term as vivid as if he saw it on his screen. He moved painfully, still bruised from his encounter with Boulder’s landscaping, but the changes to his teleportation protocol remained crystalline in his mind.

He showered, ate toast that tasted like cardboard, and sped to the lab as if racing against time. The building was nearly empty. Saturday afternoons belonged to undergraduates drinking beer and faculty attending their children’s soccer games. Laurel had no time for such frivolities.

The apparatus awaited him expectantly, as if impatient to be used, black cables snaking between workbenches like arteries of an alien creature. Today, he saw it differently, seeing the flaws in his original design that the parity correction would address. The breakthrough felt less like a discovery than like suddenly remembering something he’d always known.

He began with the entanglement generator, recalibrating the laser arrays according to the new specifications. The modifications were substantial but not major: a few shifts in frequency, some adjustments to polarization angles, a couple of new timing sequences for the measurement protocols. Each change followed inexorably from the framework he’d developed in his post-concussion clarity.

The work required twelve hours of meticulous recalibration. Optical alignments that had taken weeks to perfect originally now demanded complete reconfiguration. His hands worked with perfect steadiness, last night’s trauma notwithstanding.

Maya found him there Sunday morning, hunched over the rematerialization chamber with a jeweler’s loupe banded around his forehead and precision screwdrivers in his mouth.

“You look terrible,” she said, settling into her usual chair with coffee for both of them.

“I feel productive.” Laurel accepted the cup gratefully, realizing he hadn’t eaten since the previous afternoon. “I solved the parity problem.”

“The what problem?”

“Map preservation during quantum rematerialization.” He gestured at the modified apparatus, though he knew the changes wouldn’t be visible to anyone but him. “The original protocol kept introducing systematic errors in transmission. Objects could not rematerialize intact.”

Maya showed a bit more interest. “That sounds catastrophic,” she said.

“It would have been. But the solution is quite elegant, if I could say so myself.” Laurel turned to his computer, calling up the equations he’d derived Friday night. “A phase correction in the entanglement sequence that preserves quantum signatures during transmission. The math is really quite beautiful.”

Maya studied the screen with the polite attention of someone examining poetry in a foreign language. “When did you figure this out?”

“Friday night. After I got mugged.”

“You got mugged?” Her voice rose sharply. “Are you all right? Did you report it? What happened?”

She fired the questions without pausing, eyes wide with obvious concern. Laurel found himself touched by her reaction, though he wasn’t sure how to respond. Emotional comfort wasn’t his area of expertise.

“I’m fine, really, I am,” he said, which was mostly true despite the headache and the twinges in his shoulder each time he moved it. “The mugger didn’t actually get anything. I fell running away, hit my head… Somehow, the impact seems to have clarified my thinking. I came back here and worked through the night.”

Maya reached out as if to examine his injuries, then stopped herself. “You should have gone to a hospital. Head trauma can be serious.”

“It was productive trauma. I’ve been stuck on this problem for months, and suddenly the solution was obvious.” He saved his work and turned to face her properly. “Sometimes breakthroughs require the disruption of our usual thought patterns.”

“Sometimes breakthroughs require not dying of a brain hemorrhage,” Maya countered. “Promise me you’ll see a doctor if you have any symptoms. Headaches, nausea, vision problems, anything.”

“I promise.” The words felt strange in his mouth, weighted as they were with emotions, which made him acutely uncomfortable. But Maya’s concern seemed genuine, and he didn’t want to disappoint her.

She stayed while he finished the final calibrations, asking occasional questions about the changes to the apparatus, but mostly offering companionship. Her presence made the lab feel less like a sterile workshop and more like a place where human beings might actually congregate. Laurel found himself working better with her there, as if her attention somehow validated the importance of what he was attempting.

By Sunday evening, the apparatus was ready for the first test run. Laurel began with simple objects: a paperclip, a pencil, a coffee mug. Each item was placed in the transmission chamber, scanned at the quantum level, disassembled into information, transmitted to the receiving station across the lab, and reconstructed from local matter. The process took several minutes per object, the machinery singing theremin tunes as photons carried data through quantum channels.

Each rematerialization was perfect. The paperclip emerged with an identical molecular structure, the pencil with its graphite core exactly where it had been in the original, the mug – a perfect replica down to the coffee stains. The parity corrections were working exactly as they should, preserving mapping and preventing the systematic errors that would have made teleportation impossible.

Maya watched with the fascination of someone witnessing magic, and not technology. “How do you know it’s actually the same object? I mean, how do you know you’re not just making very good copies?”

“That’s a philosophical question, not a scientific one,” Laurel answered, adjusting the chamber’s alignment between tests. “If every atom is in exactly the same position with exactly the same quantum state, what meaningful distinction exists between original and copy? The information content is identical.”

“But what about continuity of existence? If you destroy the original to make the copy, isn’t something essential lost?”

“What essential thing? Every atom is in exactly the same place and state. If all of these are preserved perfectly, then continuity is maintained regardless of the source of the specific atoms involved.”

“So it doesn’t matter that I just watched this coffee cup broken down into subatomic particles, into nonexistence, before being 3-D printed?” Maya was troubled by the implications. “How can it be the same object?”

“If Theseus restores his aging ship one plank at a time, is it still the same ship when he is finished? This is just like that.”

Laurel moved to larger test subjects. A potted plant emerged from rematerialization with every leaf intact, roots and their dirt exactly as they were, and giving every appearance of robust life. A mechanical clock maintained perfect timekeeping after teleportation, its gears and springs aligned exactly as before transmission. The real test would, of course, require higher levels of complexity, complexity that only an animal subject could provide.