Because you see, having just been born, I had barely a day to live. If that. It was a cruel universe I was born into.
I was in a cell. In a prison. Another man was in my cell, he'd already got up, and was eyeing me warily. I ignored him. He said, "You owe me six packs of Ramen, bitch, and you'd better not give me that 'I've just met you!' shit!"
This was the terrible thing about my short life, was that while on the pro side I was born fully educated, on the con side other people's lives, people now dead, had some kind of effect on how my life would be now.
I searched my implanted memories, the ones I had upon my birth five minutes ago. I was here because of some long ago man, who looked pretty much like me, and knew he only had one day to live, and he'd thus decided to rob a bank, steal a car, and then upon seeing a pretty woman, do what used to be called "mashing" but now was called "sexual assault". He had led the police on quite a merry chase, and one had died in an auto accident while chasing him.
When they arrested him and got him to the station, an old sergeant asked if he had any idea how much time he'd be facing, but he'd laughed and said, "A few hours!" And he'd been right. A few hours later, he'd died.
But incarnations of me ever since had to be born in prison.
And apparently a more recent incarnation of me had incurred a debt from someone. And while that guy was dead, and who he'd incurred the debt with was dead, here was a successor of the debtor demanding pay from me. Hardly seemed fair.
Life was too short for fighting, though. I had access to the former guy's stash of Ramen, securely under the mattress, so I got that out and passed it over. What need would I have of it? I briefly wondered what need the last guy had had of it. Oh, just to pay this lug. Hmm.
I started off to my first breakfast, with full knowledge of how crappy it'd be tasting. Sucks to be born new but nothing ever be new.
I took the tray of slop to a seat and sat. A young kid came up, grinned, jammed two fingers into the scoop of powdered eggs I'd been looking at suspiciously and said, "Hey, Scotty, I don't think we've met, have we?"
He clearly thought we had, and yes, of course I had memories, implanted, of him. He took great delight in asking each reincarnation of me the same thing. I flexed towards him, like I was going to fight him, and he chuckled and moved away. Previous incarnations of me had demonstrated a lack of care about incurring any physical pain or damage, and so I was given respect by all those who assumed I was them.
Handy. Few enough things were.
"Can I sit here?", said a timid voice. I looked up, and it was a new guy. No, no, not just new to me, me being here for the first time myself, but new in the sense that I had no memories of him from other incarnations. He must be new new.
"Suit yourself", I said. He said, "I'm Jim, and I gather you're Scotty?"
I looked him up and down. "My name is Brent. They call me Scotty as others who've looked like me know a lot about Transporters. And, I guess I know a lot about Transporters, too."
He looked dubious. "What kind of transport?", he asked. "Matter transmission", I said. "You know, where you dematerialize an object and beam it at light speed to another place, then rematerialize it?"
He laughed. "Oh, I get a loony right off, eh? That's all right, pal, you beam around wherever you want, I'm just here to do my time."
I guess I figured I owed something to future incarnations of me, as I'd benefited by some of the actions of those before me. So I kept up the tough persona that others who'd looked like me had cultivated. I stopped eating, glared and held my hand towards him, that now held a shiv instead of a spork.
I'd got that from under my bunk, too. I said, "I know transporters aren't real, but I know all about why no one in their right mind would ever use one is all. You want to know, or you want to stay ignorant?"
He looked at me. He took a bite of food and chewed it while still looking at me. He swallowed and said, "I'm not trying to get off on any wrong foot. You talk as you like. I've no beef with you." And he took another bite.
Pacified a bit, I said, "Fair enough." I put the shiv away as fast as I'd brought it out, glad that I had such muscle memory built into me. I said, "You know about Star Trek, how they're always beaming around?" Jim nodded. I said, "Ever notice how the doctors on that show hated using it? It's because they suspected it was killing them."
"What do you mean?", Jim asked. "I've seen that show enough to know that no one ever died from beaming around."
I nodded, "So they want you to believe, but truth is, they all died each time they used it. What came out on the other end was a copy. Not them. They died, the copy arrived."
Jim continued to eat, and seemed to be mulling that over. I gave him time, and used that time to get down some of what pretended to be food. Finally he said, "I think I actually get you. There was that one episode, with what's his name, Riker?"
I nodded, and leaned forward, excited that I was dealing with someone who might not be completely ignorant. Jim continued, "Yeah, there was some transporter accident, and while he beamed up, another of him failed to arrive and bounced back down to the planet. So there were two of him. And they acted like the one on the planet was a copy, but I always wondered..."
"How did they know which wasn't real?", I chimed in with him.
He smiled, "Yeah, okay, so they're probably both copies, from what you're saying. But how about when it works?"
I said, "Then there is just the one copy. Make no mistake, when they 'dematerialize' they are dying. Their info is encoded, but they die. Then the 'pattern' is sent at light speed, maybe the energy, too, and it's reassembled. Into a being that looks and thinks exactly like them, and thinks it's them, but is not."
Jim said, "Yeah, okay, I get all that. But why would anyone give you grief over that? Or call you Scotty over you thinking that way? Or is it that they just don't like Trekkies?"
I said, "Well, I'm new myself, but I think it's because past people who looked like me tried to explain to them the logical conclusions of what that means for us. They thought those folks were crazy."
Jim said, "What folks that looked like you? And explained what conclusions?"
I said, "See, if you think about it, your life depends upon what we might call a 'continuity of consciousness'. When that's broken, like in a transport, then you're dead, and a copy continues. But is that the only way your consciousness can suffer an interruption?"
Jim watched me warily. He finished his plate. He said finally, "Okay, I'll bite. What other way is your consciousness interrupted? And you've still not told me who the others who looked like you were."
I said, "Sleep. Your consciousness stops. There are times 'you' might be dreaming, but other times you are not. You aren't thinking or dreaming, or anything. Then, from whatever jumble of electrical impulses are still in play, your 'you' is reformed, and then you awake. But that 'you' is a copy, you actually died. The ones that looked like me are all the ones before today who still answered to my name. Me, I just got created this morning when I awoke."
Jim shook his head and got up with his now empty tray and left. I finished my own meal and did likewise. Later that evening in my cell I could overhear some talking about when they'd get out. I had no need to worry about that, though.
It was lights out in five minutes, and soon after I'd be dead.
