Inversion - 4

The mouse arrived next Monday morning in a standard transport cage, its pink nose twitching at the unfamiliar smells. Maya had delivered it with visible reluctance, her composure strained by what she clearly considered an escalation into dangerous territory.

“His name is Pascal,” she said, setting the cage gently on Laurel’s workbench. “He’s been part of our metabolic studies for six months. Clean bill of health, excellent reflexes, no signs of stress-related disorders.”

Laurel studied the animal through the wire mesh. Pascal was unremarkable – a standard lab mouse with white fur and an alert expression, clearly a creature well-accustomed to human handling. What he was, however, was something unprecedented: the first conscious being that would experience quantum teleportation and, hopefully, survive to be examined afterward.

“Why Pascal?” Laurel asked.

“After Blaise Pascal. He wrote about the wager – about choosing to believe despite uncertainty.” Maya’s voice carried an edge that made Laurel look up from his equipment checks. “Seemed appropriate for a mouse about to become either a miraculous survivor or one very expensive bloody mess.”

Her words touched something deep in Laurel. The inanimate objects and the plants he had teleported were one thing – complex arrangements of matter, but lacking the consciousness that made animal life special. Pascal possessed something they had not: awareness, however rudimentary. The capacity for experience.

“The math is sound,” Laurel said, more to himself than to Maya. “Every simulation predicts perfect rematerialization. The prior tests were perfect.”

“Math does not feel pain,” Maya replied. “Math doesn’t have to live with the consequences of being torn apart and reassembled at the quantum level.”

She was right, of course. But progress required someone to cross the threshold between theoretical possibility and practical reality. Pascal would either emerge unharmed, proving that consciousness could survive quantum transmission, or something would go wrong in ways that would teach them essential lessons about the process.

Laurel had spent the weekend tweaking his protocols for animal subjects. The scanning resolution had been increased to capture neural activity patterns with even higher precision. The rematerialization algorithms now included refined templates for metabolic processes, ensuring that cellular function would resume immediately on reassembly. Every precaution he could think of had been implemented.

The transmission chamber had been fitted with life support systems – oxygen supply, temperature control, electromagnetic shielding to prevent interference with delicate metabolic processes. Maya had insisted on monitoring equipment that would track Pascal’s vital signs throughout the procedure, providing real-time feedback about his condition.

“If anything goes wrong,” she said, connecting sensors to Pascal’s tiny body with practiced confidence, “we stop immediately. No second attempts, no modifications to try again. One chance only.”

“Agreed,” Laurel said, though he felt confident that Pascal would emerge from the process unchanged. The tests with dead animals had proven the system’s ability to preserve cellular structure. Living subjects simply added ongoing neural activity, which the enhanced scanning protocols were designed to handle.

Pascal seemed calm as Laurel placed him in the transmission chamber. His heart rate, displayed on Maya’s monitors, remained normal. Either the mouse possessed unusual equanimity, or he lacked sufficient cognition to comprehend his situation, Laurel reflected. Probably the latter, which struck him as a form of mercy.

The scanning sequence began with subtle harmonics as lasers mapped out Pascal’s quantum state. Every atom in his small body was catalogued with precision that exceeded the theoretical limits of measurement – a paradox resolved by the fact that the scanning process necessarily destroyed the original while creating a perfect informational duplicate.

Maya watched the vital signs display with the intensity of someone monitoring a surgical patient. “Heart rate steady. Respiration normal. Neural activity consistent with light anesthesia. Everything looks stable.” Pascal winked out of existence.

The transmission took longer than it did with inert objects. Pascal’s biological complexity required more information than a paperclip, coffee mug, or even a plant – not just molecular structure but animal life’s complex ongoing electrochemical interactions. The quantum channels recorded every bit of data that represented consciousness in its most elementary form.

Rematerialization took place in the receiving chamber on the other end of the lab. Coherent light filled the space as matter assembled itself. First the skeletal framework, then organs and tissue, finally the neural networks that would allow Pascal to resume his existence as a conscious being – all of them appeared in a flash.

The mouse that emerged looked identical to the one that had entered the transmission chamber. It was the same size, same coloration, with the same subtle whisker movements. But appearances could deceive – the key question was whether Pascal’s consciousness had survived the journey.

Maya was as thorough as she knew how to be. Blood pressure registered normal. Heart rate was within expected ranges. Reflexes proved to be intact. Responses to stimuli remained appropriate. Even his behavior seemed unchanged – the same alertness, the same cautious curiosity about his surroundings.

“I don’t see anything wrong,” she said with wonder in her voice. “Blood chemistry is normal. Neural activity matches pre-transmission patterns. It’s as if nothing happened to him at all.”

Maya wanted to observe the animal for a few days, but Laurel was insistent on an immediate autopsy. He had to know if it really worked. Even under the microscope, Pascal’s biology still looked flawless. Neural pathways were intact, cellular structure normal, no signs of any systemic damage.

“Extraordinary,” Maya murmured, examining tissue samples under her microscope. “There’s literally no trace that he was ever disassembled. The cellular repair mechanisms are functioning normally, the neural connections are intact, even the metabolic byproducts in his blood are exactly what I’d expect from a healthy mouse.”

Laurel felt satisfaction rather than surprise. Inert objects teleported without issues, so why not a living animal? It was seeing years of theoretical effort become reality before his eyes that was the thrill for him. This is what he lived for. It was why he chose to be an experimentalist.

Pascal’s examination confirmed that consciousness was indeed preserved during transmission. But one successful test proved only that the process worked, not that it worked reliably.

The next subject was a rat Maya dubbed Descartes, honoring the philosopher who had believed in the separation of mind and body. If consciousness could survive quantum transmission, then perhaps Descartes had been wrong about its fundamental nature. Perhaps the mind was simply another form of information, no more mysterious than any other pattern that could be coded and sent.

Descartes was quite a bit larger than Pascal, with greater neural mass. His brain contained millions more neurons, billions more synaptic connections, vastly more information that would need to be captured and preserved during teleportation. The scanning process took longer, the quantum channels processed denser data streams, but the result was the same: perfect rematerialization with no apparent loss of function.

Examination demonstrated the same flawless preservation she’d found with Pascal. Every organ remained normal, every neural pathway remained intact. Descartes emerged from teleportation as himself – the same rat that had entered the transmission chamber, merely relocated through a few feet of space by quantum-mechanical means.

The third subject was a rabbit, chosen for its greater mass and more complex neural architecture. Rabbits possessed more sophisticated memory, social recognition, the capacity for complex learned behaviors that would make rematerialization errors immediately apparent. If something essential was lost during teleportation – some aspect of consciousness too subtle for direct measurement – a rabbit would be complex enough to reveal the deficit.

Maya named her Hypatia, after the ancient mathematician who had been torn apart by religious zealots. The parallel felt uncomfortably apt – another conscious being subjected to dismemberment, though hopefully with more positive results.

Hypatia’s teleportation proceeded smoothly. The scanning captured her neural state with the same precision applied to the smaller animals, the transmission channels carried her information across the lab without error, and the rematerialization process assembled from subatomic particles, exactly as specified by the quantum data.

The reconstructed rabbit exhibited all of Hypatia’s original behaviors. She recognized Maya’s scent, responded appropriately to food rewards, navigated her enclosure with the same level of spatial awareness she’d demonstrated before teleportation. Even her personality remained intact – the same mixture of curiosity and caution that she had shown previously.

“This is becoming routine,” Maya observed, watching Hypatia investigate a new toy with familiar wariness. “Three for three, no complications, no side effects. It’s almost anticlimactic.”

But Laurel found the consistency encouraging rather than boring. Each successful test confirmed that the process worked exactly as predicted by theory. Each autopsy showed perfect preservation. Consciousness was information, and information could be transmitted across space without degradation. The philosophical implications were staggering, but the practical applications were becoming clear.

The fourth subject pushed the boundaries further: a rhesus monkey. Primates possessed cognitive abilities that approached human sophistication – self-awareness, problem-solving skills, the capacity for emotional states that would make any rematerializtion errors psychologically traumatic.

Maya objected strenuously to using such an intelligent subject. “Mice and rats and rabbits are one thing,” she argued. “But monkeys are different. They have sophisticated personalities, relationships, memories that matter to them. If something goes wrong…”

“Nothing will go wrong,” Laurel said, confident after the prior three runs. “The process is identical regardless of subject complexity. More information to transmit, but the same fundamental procedures.”

The monkey’s name was, naturally, Darwin. He was young and healthy, and full of the bright intelligence that made rhesus monkeys so good for research. His cognitive abilities would be the most stringent test yet of teleportation’s ability to preserve consciousness intact.

Darwin’s scanning required the most time yet. The monkey’s neural complexity demanded quantum measurement at finer resolution, capturing not just synaptic patterns but the states of electromagnetic fields that characterized ongoing mental activity. The process took nearly an hour, during which Darwin remained sedated but neurologically active.

The rematerialization was correspondingly elaborate. Darwin’s reassembly occurred in careful stages – skeletal structure, then organs, then the intricate neural networks that supported his consciousness, all in the blink of an eye. Maya checked his vital signs, watching for any indication of potential damage.

When Darwin emerged from the receiving chamber, he looked unchanged – same physical dimensions, same neural activity patterns, same behavioral responses. Examination showed perfect physiological function at every level she could measure, but the real test came when Darwin was allowed to recover from sedation. Would his consciousness resume seamlessly, or would there be gaps, discontinuities, signs that something essential had been lost in transmission?

Darwin awakened with the same alert curiosity he’d shown before teleportation. He recognized Maya immediately, responded to his name, demonstrated all the cognitive abilities that he had before. Even his personality quirks remained intact – the same preferences for certain scents, the same wariness of unfamiliar objects, the same social responses to human interaction.

“Remarkable,” Maya said, watching Darwin solve a puzzle that had been challenging him before teleportation. “Not just that his intelligence is intact, but that his memories are preserved. He remembers learning this task, remembers the strategies that worked and didn’t work. His entire experience survived the process.” Again, the autopsy came out clean.

The final test was the most ambitious yet: a pig borrowed from the agricultural college. Pigs had a much greater mass, and their intelligence was comparable to dogs, with sophisticated social behaviors, and neural architecture complex enough to serve as models for human cognitive processes. If consciousness could survive teleportation in a pig, then the technology would be ready for its ultimate application.

Maya named the pig Bacon, despite Laurel’s objection that the name was inappropriate for a research subject. “He’s going to be disassembled at the quantum level,” she said. “I think he can handle a little nomenclatural irony.”

Bacon’s teleportation represented the culmination of months of refinement. The scanning protocols had been optimized for maximum neural resolution, the transmission channels calibrated for perfect fidelity, the rematerialization algorithms enhanced to handle the size and complexity of a large mammal’s central nervous system. Every component of the system had been tested and verified through the previous experiments.

The process took nearly two hours – longer than any previous attempt, but necessary to capture the full scope of Bacon’s mass. Maya monitored his vital signs throughout with mock ennui. “Heart rate stable, neural activity continuous, metabolic processes normal. It’s as if we’re just moving him very slowly from one room to another.”

Bacon emerged from rematerialization exactly as predicted. Same weight, same neural patterns, same behaviors, same personality as before transmission. Maya’s examination revealed flawless preservation at every level – molecular, cellular, systemic, neurological.

But the most convincing evidence came from Bacon’s behavior. He recognized his favorite treats, responded to his name, demonstrated the same problem-solving abilities he’d shown before teleportation. Even his emotional responses remained intact – the same curiosity about novel objects, the same social interactions with human handlers.

“Five for five,” Maya said, reviewing the accumulated data from all the animal tests. “Perfect rematerialization every time, no detectable damage, no loss of function or personality or memory. It’s not just working – it’s working flawlessly.”

Laurel nodded, though he felt anticipation rather than satisfaction. The animal tests had proven the system’s capabilities, but they represented only preparation for the real goal. With consciousness successfully preserved across species from mice to pigs, the technology was ready for its ultimate demonstration.

There was no room for doubt any longer. Human consciousness was information, and information could be transmitted across space without degradation. The animal tests had confirmed this principle across a range of neural complexities. The logical next step was inevitable. He would teleport himself, of course.

The decision felt less like courage than like a necessity. Every experiment had confirmed his theoretical predictions, every rematerialization had been flawless. The system was ready for human application, and Laurel was the only person who fully understood both the technology and its implications.

Maya would object, of course, if he told her. She would be worried about safety, demand more testing, insist on doctor oversight. Laurel knew that it was natural for someone who didn’t fully understand. He was convinced now that the process was completely safe.

The animal tests had served their purpose. They conclusively showed that consciousness could survive quantum transmission intact, that personality, memory, and individual identity were all preserved. Pascal, Descartes, Hypatia, Darwin, and Bacon had all emerged from teleportation entirely unchanged, their essential selves sent successfully across the intervening space.

Now it was time for the final test. Time to prove that the boundaries between here and there were nothing more than fictions, that space was merely another aspect of the quantum field.

He would run it over the weekend, when the building was going to be empty and interruptions – not too likely. The receiving station would be positioned in the top-floor lab, far enough from the transmission chamber to make the distance meaningful but close enough to ensure signal integrity.

Maya would understand. When she saw him emerge unharmed from the receiving chamber, when she realized that he had successfully transported himself across space without losing anything of his identity, she would recognize the achievement for what it was: humanity’s first step toward mastering the fundamental structure of reality itself. Success was not just probable – it was inevitable. The universe was about to become a much smaller place.