Melmont's Day

Jack Melmont tweaked one last little wire, then stood up from his cluttered workbench. The amount of time and trouble that he had put into this project-- all his own time, time spent after work, on his own-- totaled almost three hundred hours. He was finally finished with his pet project.
Ever since the advent of cold fusion in 2116, the inventions had just kept rolling. There was an unlimited amount of power out there, and things he had never imagined could happen were happening. First, there were the flight cars, then the true hover cars. Flight cars relied on mini jet engines to propel them, but hover cars generated enough power to actually over come gravity. They initially called them repulsor lift vehicles, but that was a misnomer-- they actually did no repulsing of anything. Instead, they used the powerful converters to change the energy of gravity into an opposite force. The vehicles had zero mass when empty and off (a relative term, now that energy is very nearly free- they sucked up about four gigawatts per minute just hovering), but when you juiced them up, they actually gave you a negative weight.
But teleportation had not yet been discovered. Numerous attempts had been made, all using particle acceleration techniques, but they usually ended up vaporizing whatever test object was used, due to Heisenberg problems. Heisenberg said that, due the constant movement of molecules, there was no way to accurately put them back in the exact same place. What had come out of early teleportation experiments was more like synthesizing experiments. One teleportation scientist had even turned lead into gold when he accidentally cranked the power up too high on his teleporter.
Jack Melmont, though, thought a little differently than most people. Instead of accelerating particles, Jack Melmont tried slowing them down. When he first put a rock through his teleporter, it came through at exactly the same displacement and mass as it had before, something never accomplished in the vast field of teleportation science. A small piece of wood made it, losing only one tenth of one percent of its total moisture in the process, a record. His confidence swelled to unparalleled heights after that.
His next test was a basketball. The rubber bladder would have to remain totally airtight after transport for global safety standards; after all, if a ball couldn’t retain air through transport, imagine what might happen to a human’s lung.
He placed the ball on a shining gold plate, and powered up his device. He flicked a green switch, and the fusion reactor hummed to life. When the Gwatt meter climbed above three, he pressed a silver button, and the ball immediately disappeared from sight. Less than a second later, it reappeared on another gold plate across the room.
His heart leapt in his chest. He resisted the temptation to immediately jump on the plate and zap himself across the room, but instead he grabbed the ball and weighed it.
Perfection! Not a single nanogram was lost!
His heart danced again. He adjusted the height of the diodes, and stepped onto the plate. Double checking the gauges, he reached for the silver button, and pressed it.


All the mortician had to put in Jack Melmont’s casket were his two gold teeth, found on a strange gold tray in his basement laboratory.