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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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I've said it before and I'll say it again:
In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of "mental energy" in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.
Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can "know" if you are or aren't a brain in a jar.
So what about the Riker duplicate? Which one is soulless? Or is the soul also copyable?
Thomas Riker isn't a transporter duplicate, he's a kidnap victim from a parallel dimension.
Thomas Riker supposedly proved that the transporter can be used to duplicate sentient living beings. So why aren't there mass-produced transporter duplicates? There are plenty of unscrupulous powers that would love to exploit this existential loophole and create huge armies of Jem Hadar or some such. They would have no ethical limitations on making such things, and broadly speaking if a scientific / engineering problem CAN be solved then it WILL be solved, and doubly more so when someone proves that it definitely CAN be solved.
Because the theory of his creation is wrong. He wasn't duplicated by the interference field, his transport beam was filtered through a parallel dimension and back, and captured Thomas from his home dimension and dropped him in ours. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, we know that transporter fuckery can cause trans-dimensional transporting. When they discovered Thomas, they got the interpretation of the phenomenon wrong, and set everyone on a drastically wrong path of research. His duplication hasn't been duplicated, because he was never duplicated to begin with.
If your "soul" or "mental energy" is basically your brain programming, I would say it is copyable.
Also a valid theory, and less complicated than the parallel universe kidnap victim theory.
Yeah, but it doesn't explain why less scrupulous factions don't just copy their most valuable biological assets. Best captains, strongest warriors. Most cunning spies.
I mean… if there were 25,000 of me around, we definitely wouldn’t be following someone else’s orders to die in their war. I imagine that if you copy a person too many times, they tend to stop taking directions as well. Like, if a person can’t unionize with themself, then I don’t know how to help them.
jem hadar maybe not, but even they have a limit, and once they thought they were no longer dependent on ketracel white, they reached it really quickly.
So I guess the answer is to get your clone army hooked
What if you copied them without their knowing? Like, you have an operative heading out on a secret mission. Undisclosed location. Then, just save them in the buffer. Bring them out whenever you need, like the Winter Soldier. You could even have concurrent missions going. Then, just delete them or store their patterns again when the mission is complete.
Isn't that the plot of Gemini Man? And The 6th Day? And Blade Runner?
Pretty much. I was actually thinking about The 6th Day while typing that. I haven't seen that since I had it on VHS.
Well, fuck