Teleportation Anyone?

High-energy physicist Daniel Isaac stood in front of a very large mechanism. It stood about three meters tall and seven long, and was roughly three meters wide. He and thirty other physicists had been working on it for four years, and it was finally ready for testing. It was a quantum teleportation device, designed for masses of up to a hundred and fifty kilos. Tests started, MRIs were made of many objects, organic and inorganic, and every time the machine worked flawlessly, transporting the objects across the room into the receiver instantly in a flash of bright, white light.
The physicists were ecstatic: four years of hard work and sleepless nights had paid off so beautifully that they were nearly drunk with happiness. The mathematicians were hugging each other shamelessly, and the physicists were just standing there grinning foolishly at it as the room was lit by one blinding flash after another. Several people dragged new and interesting things to teleport out, and the machine responded perfectly, depositing a pile of dust with a pattern traced in it exactly as it had been set in the tray. Someone turned up with beers, and the party started for real. The flashes were repeated more and more often, with less and less care taken between each flash. Eventually, someone brought in a guinea pig from the biology section of the university, and it was transported as well. The guinea pig stumbled around for a while, but seemed none the worse for wear.
Through a hazy vision, Dr. Isaac saw his friend, Dr. Antoni step onto the transportation platform as his friends drunkenly cheered him on. Daniel yelled for them to stop, but the men around the transporter were too drunk to care, and to excited to bother listening. There was a flash of light and Antoni disappeared from the transporter and reappeared, grin and all, on the other side of the room. The flock of physicists around the machine turned around and dashed drunkenly off to the other side of the room. Cries of “What’s it feel like?” were punctuated with yells. Antoni didn’t seem like he was hurt, but the grin was slipping off his face. Suddenly, he simply toppled, falling over sideways.
The shouts became alarmed as Antoni began to whimper. Dr. Isaac joined the mad rush towards Antoni, who was now trying to stand up. He slipped sideways again and fell over. When he saw the rush of people he screamed and thrashed on the floor, apparently trying to slide himself away from the mad rush. The atmosphere in the room sobered quickly. Questions rained down on Antoni worthlessly,
“Are you okay?”
“Can you stand up?” and
“What happened? Are you alright?”
Antoni’s only response was to wail piteously.
“Let’s get him to the hospital,” said Daniel. They picked him up carefully, and carried him out of the room towards the university’s hospital wing.
Once in the hospital wing, the doctors found nothing wrong with him, a physical gave no new unknown information. Full body MRI’s were of no use, it was not until an EEG was run that something came up. What it was, the doctors were unsure, but there was something wrong.
“There is something missing,” said Dr. Kolliner, it appears that there are no Karmachian waves being processed at all.”
“Lay man’s terms please?” asked Dr. Isaac.
“The part of his mind that deals with memories is completely dormant. There is no activity. Even under normal conditions, some memories are being unlocked, but in this case there are none at all. At least, none that our instruments are picking up. Those should have been firing all along, to decipher what we were saying at least, but there is nothing. It’s like looking at a severe case, over the tops case of Alzheimer’s disease, or something similar. Maybe Down syndrome.”
“Doctor, do you know how memories are stored?” inquired Dr. Isaac.
“Back in the twenty first century, scientists believed that memories were stored as proteins that were accessed by the brain whenever needed and produced and edited on the fly. However, memory is not apparently affected by the disability to produce proteins, subjects heavily dosed with protein synthesis inhibitors. Additionally, there is no evidence for large amounts of protein synthesis within the brain itself. Routtenberg was somewhere closer to the truth than his forerunners and colleagues. He realized that there was some change in the synapses of the nerves in the brain. However, he believed that these changes were protein based.
“Present theory seems to indicate that proteins have nothing to do with memory. Somehow, events change the very shape of the synapses themselves, memories are etched into the cells. That aside, is there a reason you asked this?”
“Actually, yes,” said Dr. Isaac, “As you have been told, our friend here was teleported, and I wondered how the events were connected.”
“Could you clarify how exactly the teleporter operates?” inquired Dr. Kolliner, “it may help me understand what happened.”
“In essence, the body is destroyed in one place are reconstructed in another. There is no dangerous amount of radiation involved, no chemicals, nothing. An instant scan copies every detail of the object to be transported, constructs it from large bricks of pure elements, and then vaporizes the original, sorting the elements and storing them so that they can be used again.”
“I see. So this isn’t really Antoni, just a carbon copy with none of the memories?”
“You could say that I guess, that is what it looks like anyway.”
“How do you scan the object exactly?”
“It’s a tad complex, but in essence, it is all tied in with the reconstruction. Each atom is read with very precise lasers. The lasers are so powerful that they vaporize the original at the same time as they read them. The machine is very accurate, electron spin and location are preserved, getting around Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was a trick, but it should have worked perfectly.”
“Did you test it on anything else and get a strange result?”
“No, not really… No, wait. We tested a guinea pig. Came through fine, only it didn’t seem to be able to walk very well. Antoni can’t walk either. I guess with the guinea pig movement is more an instinct than a learned attribute. Practice would improve performance, but only marginally.”
“I think I understand what happened then, as well as anyone can. We can do further tests, but somehow I feel that this is a lost cause. I think that somehow, the brain has a method for categorizing the way memories are stored. When you transported him, the ‘memory,’” Here Dr. Kolliner made quote symbols in the air with his hands, “of the memory was somehow corrupted. That was not very succinct. Let me try again with an analogy: the catalogue of memories was destroyed, leaving the warehouse full, but invisible and inaccessible, if you follow my meaning. This is the result. Of course, this is only conjecture…”
“Of course. It does seem to explain things though.”
“It’s a pity really, a bright young man in essence died, and we have created the semblance of a man, thirty years into life, with no real reason to hope for his mind, memories, and past life to return.”
Dr. Isaac could only nod.