The Falling Sky

By K.A. Grant

It is the future, when teleportation is not only feasible but now being blended with societys imaginings of physical beauty.
What would you do if you could teleport your memories, longings, experiences and personality into your personal version of physical perfection?

Lucy catches sight of an improved version of herself - the 3DMe - during a commercial. The Tele-P-eLastics company is advertising for candidates to trial plastic surgery during teleportation. The display takes her breath away and ignites a longing inside to become the perfect on-screen version of her physical self. She believes she is in love with a man who truly doesnt feel the same for her and this causes her to think that a re-made Lucy will catch his eye and his heart.

Along comes Daniel tall, interesting, attractive and ostensibly interested in Lucy.
Can he help her to see her inner beauty or will Lucy succumb to pop-cultures pressure and become the someone she believes she was meant to be?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493187966

K.A. Grant

K.A. Grant is an educator in Southern Ontario. She loves dreaming of the future and mingling those ideas with the issues of today.

Book preview

The Falling Sky

K. A. Grant

Copyright © 2014 by K. A. Grant.

ISBN:                  Softcover                              978-1-4931-8795-9

                            eBook                                   978-1-4931-8796-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 05/06/2014

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CONTENTS

Congratulatory (1993)

Apprehensive (2060)

Envy (2012)

Delighted (2060)

Hope (2012-2015)

Burdened (1907)

Noteworthy (2013 And On)

Grief-Happiness Scramble (2060)

Irritable (2060)

Pressure (2060-Press Release)

Foolish (1907-1911)

Beauty (2020-On)

Conception (2025)

Kissable (2060)

Delay (Early 2040S)

Mortified (2060)

Scramble (Mid-2040S-Early ’50S)

Joy (Late 2060)

Procedure (2059)

Low (2060)

Query (2060)

Overjoyed (2060)

Pity (2020S On)

Contempt (1911-1920)

Restless (2060)

Scramble (2050S)

Satisfied (2060)

Urged (2060)

Disappointment (2060)

Enchanted (Late 2060)

Tempted (Holiday Break 2060)

Wicked (2060)

Open (Holiday Break Continued, 2060)

Zany (2060 Daniel’s Loft)

Precarious (January 2061)

Bubbles (2060)

Charmed (2060-The Party)

Brazen (January 2061, Tuesday, 7:15 A.m.)

Bittersweet (January 2061)

Deceitful (2061-Unsyndicated News)

Dumbfounded (2061)

Precarious (2061)

Tentative (2061)

Crushed (2061)

Solemn (2061)

Brace (2061; Lucy, Patient 21)

Hopeful (July 2, 2061)

Baseline (July 2, 2061)

Acknowledgments

Works Cited

To my parents.

One who always spoke to me like an adult and

One who always thought I would have something worth saying.

And to my sister.

Thank God it was you who got in the car.

Any semblance to real life should be ignored.

Really, this is just a story.

A teleportation machine would be like a fax machine, except that it would work on 3-dimensional objects as well as documents, it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of scanning it.

—IBM Research Lab

If personal continuity after the event of bodily death is a fact, if the psychic functions continue to exist as a separate individual or personality after the death of brain and body, then such personality can only exist as a space occupying body, unless the relations between space objective and space notions in our consciousness, established in our consciousness by heredity and experience, are entirely wiped out at death and a new set of relations between space and consciousness suddenly established in the continuing personality. This would be an unimaginable breach in the continuity of nature.

—Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, 1907

Never hoard your silver bullet.

—George R. R. Martin

She was intrepid.

Brave, courageous, bold.

She said what she needed to with the just right amount of finesse, so people understood her but weren’t insulted by the message. She knew how to be assertive without aggression. There was a certain thing about her that made others want to be near her, and no one ever wondered where she was coming from because she was the right amount of open book without being obnoxious. People looked to her for leadership, and she always knew just what to do to lead.

She was intrepid.

In her mind, at night, right before she went to bed, her words were perfect.

At three in the morning, when she woke suddenly from another anxiety-ridden dream, her section had gone wild. Even then—she was perfect.

The rest of the time she was loud, but shy. No one really knew her for who she truly was, and her best friend regularly reminded her that she was hard to get to know. She was like an onion: you learned one layer at a time, none of them the same, and some of the layers could make you cry.

She did have that something that made others want to be near her though. A longtime friend of hers called it her magic. It was what made her a great facilitator. It was also what made her able to switch gears quickly in social situations.

This girl had friends in spades. She had relationships from every part of her life, and most of the people felt like they were the most important friend she had. And they were important, but maybe not as aware of who she was as she was aware of them.

She was a chameleon.

She wished that she could be as intrepid in her real life as she was in her head.

She also hated how she looked naked.

CONGRATULATORY (1993)

In 1993, an international group of scientists confirmed the intuitions of the majority of science fiction writers by showing that teleportation was indeed possible, but only if the original photon was destroyed in the process.

In the years that followed, many others demonstrated similar results. The potential of teleportation seemed to be the ability to send information over long ranges, thus eventually facilitating quantum communication. These results showed that the idea of a quantum computer, one which uses light to send vast amounts of information, was possible.

At this time, people were warned not to expect teleportation to work as they had seen on popular television shows like Star Trek. No one expected to be able to send people or other large living objects through space to another location in the foreseeable future. The complete destruction of the original and the idea that perhaps people were more than just a chemically constituted organism being the major deterrents.

People had memories, experiences, and perhaps a soul to factor into the teleportation equation.

Everyone had seen the Cronenberg movie about the man mixed with a housefly. Who would be the first person to elect to undergo such a radical process? One would need to be mentally unstable to volunteer to be teleported, right?

APPREHENSIVE (2060)

Lucy Sky woke up extremely early, as per usual. Her pet tabby was doing the tango on her liver. The dancing was a little thing, but it made it hard to sleep. Get up, get up, get up. The cat’s pointed legs were cleaving her abdomen. Cripes, cat, get off, she grumbled as she tried to push her off the bed and go back to sleep.

Daisy was having no part of that. The cat was the size of a small tank and could hold on better than was reasonable for something that wasn’t a primate.

Fine, let’s go. Lucy shuffled out of bed, sliding slowly to the bathroom. Beginning to think about the day, she cringed. This was the worst type of day.

External review night.

She had a day of facilitating to look forward to—the kids, who normally were entertaining and enjoyable, would be cranky and edgy—all because they were worried, just like she was, about how the night would go. She was a facilitator in an academy home; her section was usually quite enjoyable—but not on external review night.

The reviewers came—at least one for each child on this evening every year—and reviewed the personal case of their charge. On this night, there was always someone for whom everything seemed to be going well and then—BLAMO, the review bombs, and Lucy ends the night feeling like she was the last half rack of ribs in a southern Texas restaurant. They smile as they rip her apart and spit out the bones.

She fed the cat, showered, and dried her hair. Walking into her closet, she sighed. Most of the time she loved her clothes, but not on days like this. It was going to be a long day, and she needed to look good the entire time. Not for the first time did she wish that she was smaller and more fit. Knowing that most of the earth’s female population felt the same way didn’t really help. In fact, it pissed her off. She hadn’t been genetically blessed in that department at all.

Her family heritage was Celtic. So basically, the survival of the fittest in potato-famine terms meant that she had the genetic metabolic legacy of a rickety, half-dead goat. Her ancestors had conquered starvation through the gift of a high BMI. Apparently she was ready for the next famine at any time.

Lucy knew she was cute. In fact, she never worried about her nose or any other of her features. She honestly thought that if she were skinnier, she would be gorgeous. Alas, her rear. And her all over…

Back to the closet.

What is going to make me look professional, keep me comfortable for thirteen hours, and still look semidecent by the end of the day? She stared at the clothes.

They didn’t have anything to say.

She put on pants, a sweater, and a jacket. There wasn’t time to mull over something more exciting. Maybe someday she would find the holy grail of self-control,