According to Star Trek, teleportation deconstructs you at the atomic level, beams your particles elsewhere, and then reconstructs those exact same particles in exactly the same format. You’re fine. You’re you. You aren’t obliterated every time you request an emergency teleport to the bathroom. Never mind all the times teleportation goes wrong and creates an evil clone or merges a redshirt with a booger monster. Those are… not what happens with teleportation.

Propaganda. Starfleet’s working overtime to keep you from knowing the truth. Every one of those starships is staffed with an army of unknowing buffer clones.

Ian Zang’s Please Fix the Teleporter is a five-minute game about the harsh realities of teleportation. Theoretically, anyway.

Trying to descramble… rescramble? altscramble? a teleporter imprint.

It’s just another day in the teleporter room. Captain Gerf and Emperor Korlax have accidentally merged into a gelatinous blob of organic matter. Probably because they initiated the teleporter from the bridge rather than coming down in person. If nobody visits the place, why is there a teleporter room at all? Shouldn’t there be, you know, some etiquette around here? That’s the problem with youngsters these days. When I was a kid, I had to walk to the teleporter room to get beamed to the planet’s surface. There was no “remote” beaming. Now everybody’s beaming around willy-nilly. But what’s the rush? There’s no time to think anymore. No time to read a good book on the way to the teleporter room.

Anyway, descrambling the Captain and the Emperor is a matter of rescrambling them a bunch. Display the intended image, match up your engrams, and hopefully beat your competing teleportation engineers in matching one to the other. Grab five successful imprints before anybody else, and son, you’ve just descrambled the Captain. He didn’t even visit to say thank you. He ordered me to teleport Emperor Korlax into the heart of the nearby neutron star. That’s not much recognition for a job well done. Think I’ll deposit the Emperor on that evacuation shuttle over there. Maybe once his nemesis shows up for another round, the Captain will appreciate the important work I do down here.

In the academy, they said that teleportation engineering was “fun.” They don’t know the meaning of the word. My eight-year-old can successfully rescramble a buffer imprint, and not many of an eight-year-old’s hobbies are “fun” for adults. I had to go slow, though. Pulled my punches. Picked up one of the corners, wiggled it around, pretended I didn’t know Captain Gerf’s ugly mug was on the other side. But I did. If I wanted to, I could’ve creamed that kid. Just totally demolished her. But I didn’t. Self-esteem is very important for the proper development of an eight-year-old. The count was four-and-four and I let her win. Back in my day, my Dad would have creamed me. Look how that turned out. I’m hoping she can get a good job as a dilithium miner. Anything but following in this old lump of coal’s footsteps.

Oh, ah, lookin’ much better, captain.

I asked her if she wanted to do another Visit Daddy at Work Day. She said it was fun, but she didn’t want to try it again.

Kids these days.

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A complimentary copy was provided.