Technology is both a blessing and a curse to people, in the utility, innovation and progress it promises, and in its inevitable fate as a tool of violence in the hands of mankind, hugely as a result of our own self-serving, power-hungry nature often surpassing our sense of morals by default. Many science fiction novels, chiefly Exegesis by Astro Teller and the Jaunt by Stephen King, explore the concept of technology abuse through the medium of two different ideas alike in nature; the moral issues and difficulties of treating a genuinely and emotionally intelligent AI callously, and the wonder and excitement of the development of world-changing technologies, eventually surpassed by the sinister reality of any powerful machine’s inevitable use,
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The story recounts the discovery and great triumphs of teleportation, called the “Jaunt”, and eventually, its sinister and disquieting faults – “while the Jaunt is almost instantaneous physically, it takes a long, long time mentally,” (page 15) meaning the awakened body takes much less than a single second to pass through the Jaunt, but its separated consciousness would literally take an eternity. When the son of Mark Oates, a main character, goes through the Jaunt awake, he repeats one phrase like punctuation to all his other words: “[it’s] longer than you think,” (page 16) and in the given situation, this seemingly empty phrase becomes very literal. If Jaunting awake takes a “billion eternities” (page 15), it’s not just a long time. It’s longer than you are even able to think; you run out of thoughts before you run out of time, and when you do come out of it, your psyche will be damaged irreversibly and beyond human comprehension. Such a concept can be likened to hell, for most people, which brings us back to the central idea of technology abuse. In the world of the Jaunt, a Jaunt researcher, Lester Michaelson, had tied his wife up and “pushed her, screaming, through [a Jaunt portal] … but before doing it, [he] had pushed [a] button on his Jaunt board, erasing each of the possible portals through which [she] might have emerged,” (page 14) essentially submitting her to a true eternity of Jaunting in limbo, without a “return of light and form and body” (page 15) to end it; without a brief return to the physical world to finally end her suffering and misery. For Michaelson to be able to consciously submit someone, nevertheless his own wife, to this complete, prolonged destruction of the
The story recounts the discovery and great triumphs of teleportation, called the “Jaunt”, and eventually, its sinister and disquieting faults – “while the Jaunt is almost instantaneous physically, it takes a long, long time mentally,” (page 15) meaning the awakened body takes much less than a single second to pass through the Jaunt, but its separated consciousness would literally take an eternity. When the son of Mark Oates, a main character, goes through the Jaunt awake, he repeats one phrase like punctuation to all his other words: “[it’s] longer than you think,” (page 16) and in the given situation, this seemingly empty phrase becomes very literal. If Jaunting awake takes a “billion eternities” (page 15), it’s not just a long time. It’s longer than you are even able to think; you run out of thoughts before you run out of time, and when you do come out of it, your psyche will be damaged irreversibly and beyond human comprehension. Such a concept can be likened to hell, for most people, which brings us back to the central idea of technology abuse. In the world of the Jaunt, a Jaunt researcher, Lester Michaelson, had tied his wife up and “pushed her, screaming, through [a Jaunt portal] … but before doing it, [he] had pushed [a] button on his Jaunt board, erasing each of the possible portals through which [she] might have emerged,” (page 14) essentially submitting her to a true eternity of Jaunting in limbo, without a “return of light and form and body” (page 15) to end it; without a brief return to the physical world to finally end her suffering and misery. For Michaelson to be able to consciously submit someone, nevertheless his own wife, to this complete, prolonged destruction of the