I stood there for a moment looking at myself, wondering why my consciousness couldn't be in two places at the same time. My other self looked back eyes wide, probably wondering the same thing for a only a moment.
He suddenly knew something I didn't. He suddenly had an advantage over me, even though he was me. His thoughts and memories were now newer than mine because I was standing in the same place, and he was in a new place, seeing from a new perspective, only a few feet away.
He was an exact physical duplicate, down to the molecular construct of my brain. He retained all of my memories, there was a slight lag, a slight delay due to his being materialized after a certain amount of time had passed and his different spacial location.
The test was a complete success. The ship would be able to travel at near the speed of light, speeds no crew would survive, but no crew was now necessary. Upon arrival at its destination the ship could use available materials to re-create copies of the original crew.
It was a brilliant theory. It wasn't teleportation in the classical sense, I wondered what it would be like when the ship returned home after thousands of years of travel and re-created copies of the crew that colonized and thrived on a planet far away in another star system. I just wish I could get the original consciousness from my dead predecessor. Maybe it was the blow to the head. Why does it smell so bad in here? It smells like rotten meat and there are flies everywhere.
