Teleporter Accident: Difference between revisions

[[File:Spocklegs 2869.jpg|link=Star Trek: The Animated Series|frame|I'm dead Jim.]]

 

 

In the future, no life insurance agency will ever cover [[Transporters and Teleporters|Teleporter]] Accidents. Why? Well to start, it may accidentally send you to [[Random Teleportation|Alpha Centauri instead of Mars]] in a mis-jump, or if you slip you could suffer a [[Portal Cut]] and end up cut in two, then again if it's not there you'll suffer a [[Portal Slam]] as you hit the concrete, which is still far less painful than being teleported ''into solid matter'' and suffering a [[Tele Frag]].

 

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Noein]]'', the Dragon Knights run this risk each time they travel between dimensions. Kuina has it particularly bad, inevitably losing another chunk of himself with each transport; the only one to suffer worse is a [[Red Shirt]] who dies in the first episode when he arrives with half his body missing.

* This is referenced and mocked in the very first issue of ''Hiroshi: Strange Love'', after the titular [[Mad Scientist]] invents a teleporter. According to his assistant, "One, you'll probably end up fusing someone with an animal, two, you'll end up trapped between spaces, or three, your mind will switch with someone else's . . ." {{spoiler|It's number one--the assistant [[Catgirl|merges with a stray cat]].}}

 

* A variation occurs in ''Cable & Deadpool'': the two characters genetic code got mixed up beforehand, leading to Cable's transporter fusing them together every time they use the wrong command.

** He actually uses the "Teleport by one" command again, just to piss Cable off.

** On the other hand, the anti-terrorist vigilante Solo does indeed have that "safety catch" to his powers, and can teleport anywhere on Earth. However, he is limited to one use of the power every five minutes or so and should he attempt to do so before the "cooldown" ends, he risks injuring himself via a sort of "recoil".

 

* ''[[Event Horizon]]''. One of these leads to a movie that should have been named ''[[Nightmare Fuel]]<small>IN SPACE!</small>'' The teleporter sent the ship to a ''really'' unpleasant place, and from there it [[Came Back Wrong]], while its original crew [[Go Mad from the Revelation|left a nightmarish ship log]] before disappearing.

* The remake of ''[[The Fly]]'' has both accidental teleporting and [[Tele Frag|telefragging]]. The animals Dr. Brundle sends through come out "synthetic", inside out, and die in terrible pain. His own experiment with the teleporter doesn't go well either: a fly enters the chamber with him, and the two are merged together. [[Body Horror]] results.

* In ''[[The Prestige]]'', Tesla succeeds in creating a teleporter... sort of. {{spoiler|What really happens is that it creates a copy at the desired location, without destroying the original.}}

* In ''[[Spaceballs]]'', President Skroob reluctantly uses a transporter even though he's scared of them. His fears are realized when he materializes and the bottom half of his body is facing the wrong way. He's transported back to "fix" the problem and we find out he only needed to walk to the next room, anyway.

 

* A couple of very mild ones happen in ''[[Artemis Fowl]]: The Lost Colony'' in the time-tunnel. Artemis and Holly each wind up with one of the other one's eyes, and No1 loses a couple megabytes' worth of memories.

* [[Lampshaded]], but not used, in ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]''. In ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/The Restaurant At The End of The Universe|The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy]]'' there's an anti-teleporter [[Protest Song]] that goes:

* [[Arthur C. Clarke]]'s short story ''Travel by Wire'' wryly outlines some of the problems inherent in teleportation, with the system's designer admitting that he'd far rather travel by rocket.

* In ''[[Discworld/Interesting Times|Interesting Times]]'', Ponder Stibbons does go into excruciating detail about the risks of it happening (e.g. ending up inside a mountain, that kind of thing). The calculations come off much better than that, but {{spoiler|Instead of just swapping Rincewind and the "Barking Dog" again, they accidentally send Rincewind to [[Land Down Under|XXXX]]. The kangaroo he replaces is teleported to the university and ends up laminated against a wall.}} Ponder figures out a [[Techno Babble]] explanation for this.

* "Counter Foil" by George O. Smith is a short story where the ubiquitous teleporter system breaks down. People go in, but suddenly people stop coming out.

 

* Transporter Accidents are recurring plot devices in various ''[[Star Trek]]'' series. Which makes several characters' insistence to the safety of the procedure rather bizarre. As any viewer can tell you, when transporters mess up, the result rarely are pretty. Perhaps, like air travel, they're very safe except when they ''really'' aren't. Transporter malfunctions have been known to:

** Create a clone of an individual (Riker).

* ''[[The Comic Strip Presents]]'': "The Yob" parodies ''[[The Fly]]'' remake by having a scientist accidentally merged with a soccer hooligan. Also, at the end of the episode, a macho stud ends up with the lower body of {{spoiler|a tomcat}}.

 

* ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'' has a "deepstrike mishap" table, used when deepstriking (sometimes teleportation, but also includes tunnelling and being [[It's Raining Men|dropped from the skies]]). Since it's a mishap table, a lot of things go wrong. Some examples listed in the book includes units being fused to rocks (teleporting into impassable terrain). The newer edition is a bit more forgiving, but given the mechanics, it's anything but reliable.

** Warp Spiders can make a special teleportation "shunt" move during their assault phases. However things can go wrong, in which one member of the squad is dragged into the warp, never to be heard from again. This is especially scary for Autarchs, as (being a unit of one) only he can disappear, so it's recommended to keep him in a unit of warp spiders so that someone else can take the unfortunate fall.

* In ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' from very early times, there are Teleport and higher-level Teleport Without Error spells. That is, a regular teleport won't always take you to the exactly where you want to go. Possibly resulting in being in hostile territory. Also if you roll "mishap" you take damage.

 

* A teleporter accident with Lucca's latest invention is what starts off the adventure in ''[[Chrono Trigger]]''.

* Before that, Durandal, the rampant AI, captures the player mid-teleportation, and forces him to "Play a game" of killing the pfhor in a quarantine storage (leading to the level "Blaspheme Quarantine"), in which if the player loses, "(He and Durandal) will continue the relationship on friendlier terms," but if he loses, he dies. Later, Durandal has trouble teleporting you while you are in the alien ship. Tycho also steals the player from Durandal mid-teleportation a few times in ''Marathon: Infinity'' and once in ''Marathon 2: Durandal''.

* ''[[The Game of the Ages]]'': Until you learn to protect yourself, portal pools rip you apart.

 

* In ''[[The Order of the Stick]]'' a [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0366.html drunk wizard] teleported the party into a wrong place. On the bonus side, [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0377.html he was so drunk that eating him knocked out that Roc].

* In ''[[Wapsi Square]]'', Monica is capable of teleporting, but isn't particularly good at it. As a result, she tends to suffer comical but harmless mishaps such as [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/fillmein/ poor] [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/assledtheway/ arrival] [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/homeagain/ placement,] upside down [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/justafewholes/ on arrival,] and [http://wapsisquare.com/comic/hang-of-this/ switching clothing with the person traveling with her.]

* ''[[Red Space Blues]]'': [http://redspaceblues.com/2012/03/25/red-space-blues-79/ this]{{Dead link}} unfortunate goat, even before that the teleporter had a bad habit of duplicating a person and then exploding the original.

 

* ''[[Chakona Space]]'' gives us Dale Perkins: male human. The transporter on the orbiting space station is sabotaged in the middle of his transport, and his pattern is lost. Goldfur (Furry herm Chakat) thinks fast and shoves a cart filled with luggage, imported fruits and veggies, and other assorted knick-knacks onto the transporter pad to make up for the missing mass and tells the operator to simply use hir pattern, which hasn't been overwritten yet. Goldfur gains a new [http://furry.org.au/chakat/Images/Stumbling2.jpg twin] and Dale survives the experience and learns to live as a Chakat.

 

* In ''[[X-Men: Evolution]]'', Forge tries to extend the range of Nightcrawler's teleportation, and ends up creating rifts to the hell-like dimension Nightcrawler uses to move from place to place. Needless to say, the inhabitants get out.

* ''[[ReBoot]]'' has a [[Shout-Out]] to this in one episode. Bob tries to use a makeshift transporter (itself a [[Shout-Out]] to ''[[Star Trek]]'') to separate himself from Glitch. Bob dematerializes and then rematerializes with no change and somehow picked up a passenger along the way. Then the trope is played straight later when Bob tries to use a portal for the same purpose, only for it to explode and nearly kill him.

** In "A Fine Mess", a bug in the scanners causes Odd and Yumi to experience a [[Freaky Friday Flip]]; but then it gets much worse. Going to Lyoko like this make them unstable and at risk of being deleted permanently. Fixing it requires going to Sector V so Aelita can access XANA's private files in the Celestial Dome access computer, which she does at the last minute.

* ''[[Star Trek: Lower Decks]]'' reveals that transporter accidents now happen often enough that Starfleet has regulations concerning them. After Ensign Boimler is "cloned" by such an accident, one of the two Boimlers has to be transferred back to the ''Cerritos''.

 

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