thethemeis: What Happened Next?
theauthoris: LiamD
theauthoris: LiamD
As he walked through the heavy fire doors into Heathrow Departure Lounge 81, Miles Henderson glanced timidly toward the smooth, steel machine that towered above all else on the opposite side of the room. At approximately two and a half metres high, the device was admittedly not a great deal taller than himself, yet this particular object held certain ominous connotations in Mr Henderson’s mind. The room itself was barely as large as his lounge at home; it wouldn’t take him long to reach his destination. Briefly suspending his slow, deliberate walk toward the Instagrater Terminal, he stopped in the centre of the room and took a deep breath.
‘Take all the time you need, sir.’ the smiling attendant in the blood red uniform suggested. ‘And remember, it’s perfectly natural to have second thoughts. If at any point you decide that you no longer wish to go through with it, you only have to say.’ She flashed him a smile with her full red lips that Miles was sure had given many men before him the courage to walk through the terminal without a single look back and surely, if Miles wasn’t fifty years her elder, he may have felt the need to prove his own manhood. But while there were many downsides to growing old, one of the few aspects he enjoyed was a seemingly unconditional kindness and sympathy from young ladies, regardless of how he acted toward them.
He thanked her, and as she moved back toward the lounge entrance to greet her next customer, Miles nearly jumped at the low drawl which addressed him from beside the terminal. In his pensive state, he had momentarily forgotten about the most important member of staff in the building.
‘Good afternoon Mr Henderson, my name is Jack Eastleigh and I’ll be your pilot today.’ He held out a hand and Miles shook it firmly. ‘I’m afraid we’ve been so busy that I didn’t get a chance to read your customer records. Have you Instagrated before?’
‘Not exactly…’ Miles murmured, mostly to himself. In a sense he had done it before. In his mind he had run through the Instagration process thousands of times. The short walk to the local terminal, the quick I.D. scan and baggage check-in, the ever-so-brief wait in the now frankly redundant waiting room, the chaperone to the terminal and the brief chat with the pilot before stepping into the Instagrater and being on his merry way. There was but one detail about the process he didn’t know, a question that had plagued him for the forty years that this technology had been around and had made him walk away from his current location time and time again: What Happened Next?
What bugged Miles the most about this question was that nobody knew the answer for sure. It was impossible to prove. To describe the process as teleportation, to simply say that the Instagrater zapped you from A to B would be the epitome of over-simplification. Despite the commercial attempts at a friendly name for the service, it was the science behind the transport that Miles had come to half-understand and half-fear. An Instagratee, once ready, would be sealed inside the device and literally disintegrated. At the exact same moment of being disintegrated the ‘passenger’ would be reintegrated inside an identical Instagrater at their chosen destination.
It wasn’t even these technicalities that Miles feared exactly; billions used the service every day and he had not once even heard a whisper of the reintegration process going wrong. Miles’s fear was a more philosophical one. As a man who had been raised by well-meaning Christian parents (an ideology he later rejected entirely), Miles found it incredibly difficult to reject the notion of the human soul. That is not to say he believed in an afterlife and an all-loving God (as mentioned, he rejected the ideologies - later came to loathe them), yet he struggled to accept his conscious mind and sense of self as by-products of his physical body, molecules that could be destroyed and recreated without him noticing. As far as he was concerned, the walk to the Instagrater could well be his last. Sure, an exact copy of himself would walk out the other side believing the whole process went swimmingly and go on living his life, but what consolation was the continued existence of an (admittedly perfect) clone to an original who had ceased to exist?
When all was said and done, Miles was afraid to die and for that he could not reasonably be blamed.
So he had never gone through with it. Once he had even entered the Instagrater itself (surprisingly bare on the inside, he noted at the time) before the fear had once again become too much and he had turned tail, fleeing home. That had been the winter of ‘56, nearly twenty years ago now. Then it was thoughts of Kate, his dear companion who he couldn’t bare to part with, that had stopped him from taking the trip. Now she was gone, peacefully at least, but gone all the same, and with her, the last of his family and true friends.
Yep, he thought to himself. No one left now, I wouldn’t be anywhere near this thing if they weren’t.
‘Let’s just be done with it.’ grunted Miles and without a further word he walked inside the terminal, prepared for the worst. The steel doors closed smoothly behind him.
Inside Arrival Pod 81 of the LAX Instagration Port, Miles Henderson was recovering from a brief tickling sensation. Slowly the pod doors opened to reveal a room not entirely dissimilar from the one he had recently left. If the man now standing in front of him smiling hadn't been there, he would have sworn that he hadn't been transported at all.
'Congratulations Mr Henderson!' the stranger in the casual blue jeans and smart white shirt jubilantly exclaimed. 'You've just successfully Instagrated. How do you feel?'
Miles looked at him blankly. This perhaps was the one eventuality of the trip he had failed to prepare for. 'I feel like a stubborn old fool!' he exclaimed, though not without a smile on his lips, and promptly left the building.
Like it a lot.
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