Teleportation, Death, and the Problem of Continuity
In Star Trek , teleportation is routine. A person steps onto a platform, dissolves into light and reappears somewhere else—conscious, intact and recognised by everyone as the person who departed. The process is treated less like a mortal gamble than an elevator ride. The technical language encourages that confidence. The traveller becomes a matter stream, passes through a pattern buffer and is rematerialised at the destination. Within the fiction, the transporter normally moves a person rather than constructing a stranger from unrelated local material. That explanation works until the machine produces two William Rikers, stores Scotty as a pattern for decades or merges Tuvok and Neelix into one new being. In those cases, transport begins to resemble duplication, storage and editing. The accidents reveal possibilities that routine journeys allow the characters to ignore. Teleportation does not prove that the traveller dies. It creates a situation in which bodily persistence, psych...