The personal teleporter was the best invention ever made. You wore only a small device on your body for choosing the destination; the real magic was in the displacement engines built all over the world, and even more so in the huge computer clusters that drove them. The machines were so advanced that some thought they were half-sentient. They must have had some will of their own, as we learned. Certain people, if they happened to teleport at the same time, ended up being combined into a single being. Not an unrecognizable lump of melting meat, but a living, breathing creature with the combined mass of the two original people. One of the first was created from a renowned artist and a genius scientist. Their union combined their abilities in both fields in unexpected ways, and they exceeded the original person’s in each. When asked if they wanted to be separated again, the being answered that it was more complete now than it had ever been before. Two individuals had birthed something far greater than themselves. It would be a crime to destroy such a miracle. All the other cases concurred with this point of view: each was adamant that they were much more now than they had been.
Nevertheless, the "accidents" caused some amount of panic, though few decided that it made teleportation something to avoid, if they even could, without drastically damaging their ability to lead a normal life in the Age of Teleportation. The Transport Authority assured everyone that these anomalies were one in a billion rare accidents and that everything was fine, but it soon became clear that the cases were increasing. People were combined in twos, threes, sometimes even more. Their new forms were as starkly strange as they were unique and extraordinary in their abilities. Cities of flesh roamed the land, or even took to the skies in winged forms that dwarfed the largest airplanes ever built. Some that abstained thought it was the end of the world, but most realized this was simply the next, necessary step of our evolution. Humanity was an ocean of interlocking waves, coming together in vast streams and then scattering apart again like surf on the beach.
We, the new humans, thought in strange and wondrous ways, and we built displacement engines that could send us to every corner of the universe. We hope to encounter new civilizations and new forms of life. Their biological makeup may be totally alien, but we know that their strength will combine with ours to reach new heights of existence. Some may find the idea abhorrent, as did some of the plain old humans initially. No matter. They will understand the glory of union soon enough, and they will come to thank us for it.
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