Jack didn’t

underst. Jack

didn’t understa – st. st.

He/L? Is he th- th- th- th-Re-

eeeeeeee-e-e-e bo

oooooot. Reboot. Reboot unsucess////ful

…

When he came out again with his body intact they breathed a sigh of relief, because no-one had known what the fuck had gone wrong. Little red blinking lights and a klaxon noise, but it was fine because here was Jack and he’d made it through okay. Probably some problem in L-space. Do you know what L-space is? They didn’t either, but they chalked it up to it anyway.

So here’s Jack, good old Jack, hale and hearty as ever. I mean when he speaks to them after he rematerialises there’s undeniably something a little bit off - they expect Jack to make a joke about coming out if it with his dick intact or something, but he just kind of totters off into the night. It’s cool though. He’s had a rough day. The man was smeared over L-space 45 minutes ago. Probably. The days go on and on and in a short time people realise that actually there’s something really quite wrong with Jack, but they’re having difficulty explaining what it is. He’s become a lot more likable now. Everyone has a smile and a nod hello for Jack when he passes them in the corridor. He used to rub a lot of people up the wrong way with some of those jokes, you know? Like the one about the nuns and the dildo make out of unicorn horn? That was a doozy of a room divider. Really separated the men from the – well, from the nuns. He doesn’t bust those jokes out any more, and that’s made him more popular but it’s also sort of made him a bit dull. No-one really wants to spend time with Jack any more. He’s not stupid or dumb, no. People don’t avoid him. He’s just – and they really struggle to find a nice way of putting it, when they talk over it at the poker nights he’s no longer invited to – become a bit middle of the road. Pleasant. Affable?

Bland. That was it. Jack had become bland.

It took about fifteen years before someone realised the scale of the problem. A law intern looked up from her desk one day and wondered why 80% of her office had turned up to work wearing variations on the same pastel polo shirt. She knew the corporate life tended to homogenise people, but it still seemed a bit much. Then she wondered why no-one else seemed to think it was weird. She drove home that evening – almost uniquely nowadays she didn’t like the idea of teleporting – and sent some emails and asked some questions, and they led sort of nowhere because no-one seemed to think anything was wrong.

But when she tuned into the TV that night she watched it with fresh eyes, and saw the same smile on too many faces. The same kinds of lyrics in too many of the songs. 200 channels and she sat there as night bled into day flicking through every single one, and when she ended she found herself back where she started. She found she’d never really moved. So she kept looking. Eventually, she found Jack.

This was what she concluded.

Yes, okay, you ‘port around and your body is scrubbed into L-space (or something), and then rebuilt at the other end atom by atom, all your little processes carefully and completely reconstructed. Every cog and wheelnut in place. No problems there, you know. Peachy keen. They’d done tests. But what happened – she wondered - to the ghost in the machine? Jack had just been an accelerated case, thanks to the malfunction that heaped on his average little head the cumulative effects of a hundred thousand ‘ports in one go. We lost something precious when we ‘port, she decided. Not much. Not enough to notice. Just a tiny little shaving of … us. The bits that make us unique.

Something about being forced into and out of L-space pushes all of our brilliantly spiky, unique little personalities through a uniformly human peg, and each time we emerge fitting the mould a little better. We’re a little rounder. A little more the average human. The whole world, lock-stepping towards uniformity together.

She tried to sound the alarm, but no-one really cared. I mean - everyone was the same now. We all thought the same way. You all thought the same way? They all thought the same way.

And you know - that was actually kinda nice.