Take the Leap Today! The family in the advert grinned. Dead-eyed, rictus smiles.

 

“Take a leap of faith today,” Josh muttered under his breath, as they passed yet more ads displayed on the vibrant, too-bright screens on the walls of the terminal. Their empty eyes followed his every step.

 

Around them, the airport hummed – a hundred thousand bees droning up and down a buzzing hive, lugging suitcases and screaming children, always on the edge of collision but never quite colliding, all instinctively finding their way through the well-organised chaos. Fun fact: honeybee drones are produced asexually, meaning they are all, essentially, clones of each other.

 

“What was that?” Amy asked, slipping her hand into his.

 

“Nothing,” he said. Now was not the time for arguments. They’d had plenty of those in the days, weeks, months leading up to this moment.

 

They were early – Amy was eager to “Take the Leap” – and as a result, passport control was still closed. But it seemed she wasn’t the only one, and so they joined the budding line behind a young father, mother, son and swaddled baby, and waited patiently for the desk to open.

 

Slowly but surely, couples, families, single travellers, businessmen, and the like, filed in behind them. Some carried books, most stared at their phones, none had any baggage. There was no need; the journey wasn’t long enough to warrant carry-on. Their suitcases had been dropped off much earlier, when they first arrived at the airport, and in all likelihood, were waiting for them at their destinations already. Inanimate material – clothing, toiletries, stuffed bears and suncream, even electronics – were so much easier to transport than living, breathing, thinking human beings.

 

The baby ahead of them began to wail. Her harried young mother – eyes distant, heavily bagged, yet filled with love – put her to her breast and rocked her soothingly as she nursed.

 

Josh’s stomach turned. A black hand grasped him around the midsection. Then he saw Amy’s smile pull back into a grimace, and let go of her hand before he crushed it.

 

The father – God, he barely looked old enough to shave – put an arm around his wife’s shoulder and called to their son, a little four-year-old with an orange, food-stained mouth, and blonde hair sticking up in wild tufts.

 

The boy was playing with a plastic aeroplane, making it soar among the painted clouds of the murals on the walls – murals of a simpler time, when planes truly did soar like birds through the sky. When people flew. Unless his folks had taken him to a museum, the little lad had likely never seen a real aeroplane. The last had flown a little over six years ago, and less than half the seats had sold. Pictures and toys were the closest he’d ever come. The thought tickled Josh – along with the fact that habit and a deep-seated resistance to change meant they still called these buildings airports – yet it choked him a little, too.

 

The young father called again, and the boy came rushing over to be lifted high in his arms and smothered in kisses. The boy giggled manically, and Amy slipped her hand back into Josh’s, and squeezed.

 

They had always wanted children, discussed it on their very first date, but things got in the way – new jobs, their new flat in Bexley, biology. Despite some wonderful, wild nights together, they’d had no luck. Still, if they had been successful, there was nothing on Earth that would have convinced Josh to wait in line here today. And no force on Earth that could wrest his child from his arms to be sent off without him. You could bet on that.

 

The Leap. Instantaneous transportation. Teleportation, in layman’s terms. It terrified him to the bone.

 

Yet he seemed to be the only one. His family had all done it, Amy was as eager as anything to try it, and from the looks of the others lined up behind them – the bored faces, the humdrum chatter, the nonchalant flicking through phones – the Leap was just another part of life, not even worth getting excited for.

 

The desk finally opened, and the line began to move. A portly man behind the Perspex took, checked, and scanned their passports with all the energy of a dead battery and sent them on their way. Just another part of life. No big deal.

 

“Thank you,” Amy whispered as they passed through to the other side and entered security. “This means a lot to me.”

 

Josh said nothing. Amy was unperturbed.

 

“Just like old times, right? Except that should be the worst of the lines.” She laughed and shook her head in disbelief. “You’re allowed to smile, mister.”

 

They passed through security lickety-split. No one had any carry-on, of course – just phones and books – so a quick step through the full-body scan was all it took. They’d reduced the security checks to next to nothing initially, but a terrorist attack in Canada had put paid to that idea. Thirteen dead and a destroyed Leap chair. A tragedy to those involved, but nothing close to the deadliness or shock factor of an aeroplane hijacking. The terrorists turned to other, tried and true methods after that – Tube and festival bombings, and the like – but at least the airports were safe.  

 

They were waved through without issue, and Amy shook her head again, smiling.

 

“Won’t be long now till we’re living it up on a beach in Australia,” she said as they looked for a place to sit and wait for their gate to open. “How many are going to be there?”

 

“Close to a hundred, I think. Your whole family, mine, and partners.” Josh felt an unexpected wave of vertigo wash over him. His whole family – Mum, Dad, sister, even his aunts, uncles, and grandparents – they were all waiting in Australia, all made the Leap for Amy’s sister’s wedding. And they were all waiting for him to do the same.

 

Pippa – Pips – his little sister, had taken the Leap a year earlier (against both Josh’s and Dad’s wishes), on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Vietnam. She popped over for a weekend and popped right back, and raved about the experience to everyone who would listen. And any who wouldn’t.

 

Dad – who hated new technology with the burning passion only a curmudgeonly and balding heavyset man in his early sixties possessed, who still had his old (and mostly likely broken) VHS player and record players proudly on display in the living room – had initially refused to hear her out. But, as with all curmudgeonly, balding, and heavyset men in their early sixties, his daughter held a special place in his heart, and, after time enough to wear him down, he had been convinced. He was first in line on their Leap last week.

 

Josh, on the other hand, had only been repulsed. He found it hard to hug, hold a conversation with, or even look at the woman who had returned. Sure, she looked like Pippa, sounded and acted like her too, but, on a fundamental level – an atomic level – she was someone different, someone new. She wasn’t his Pips. And so, a brother and sister, once as close as two pens in a pack, had hardly spoken for over a year.

 

“Everything okay?” Amy asked. She tugged his shirt and nodded to a recently vacated pair of seats right beside their gate.

 

“Yeah. Nervous, I suppose.” He took his seat and she sat down next to him. She took his left hand in both of hers and held it under her chin, ran her fingertips over his wedding ring.

 

“Hey. It’s going to be great. We’ll be there for the greatest day in my sister’s life, and it’s four days of swimming, sun, and barbecues on the beach. What could be better than that? We can listen to my grandad’s racist ramblings till the sun comes up!—” That elicited his first smile of the day, however small. “—And then afterwards, it’s just a quick Leap back home, and you can pretend it never happened if you really want to. We’ll just go on living our lives as normal, yeah?”

 

“Yeah…” From the look in her eyes, he knew he couldn’t have sounded less convincing if he tried.

 

She sighed, then frowned, concern and frustrated anger warring across her perfect features. She opened her mouth to say something, hesitated, then tried again, but just at that moment, Josh’s phone began to ring. mum, read the display.

 

“Aren’t you going to answer?” Amy asked.

 

He supposed he must.

 

He pressed the green phone icon and was met with a jagged, low-res image of something resembling Mum, Dad, and Pips sitting on a balcony somewhere with the red sun going down behind them. The distortion turned the image into a scene from a Francis Bacon painting. A brief second later, the image moved, and all three began smiling and waving and calling out “Hello”, as crisp and clear as if they had been there in the airport with them.

 

“I checked the Arrival times,” Mum said, beaming happily. “Less than half an hour till you’re both here! Just spoke to your brother, Amy – he just left. He’ll be waiting for you at Sydney Airport. He has a sign and everything!” Her face abruptly dropped and she tried looking up and over Josh’s shoulder as though in doing so she could get a better look at his surroundings. “You are at the airport, aren’t you?”

 

“Of course we are! Look!” Amy grabbed the phone out of Josh’s hands and swung it round so they could see the gate, the other waiting would-be Leapers, and then back to them.

 

Mum smiled and laughed, but to Josh, that laughter never seemed to reach her eyes. It might have been a technological trick of the light, but those eyes looked dead. As did Dad’s. As did Pips’, like they had when she’d returned from Vietnam. Dead-eyed mannequins, replicas. Dead-eyed, rictus-mouthed.

 

On the other side of the world, Dad jostled the phone so the camera was pointed straight up his nose. “So, you finally convinced him?” he said. 

 

“Wasn’t so hard,” Amy replied with easy joviality. She’d always got on well with his parents, ever since the day she first met them, slipped in like another member of the family. That was when he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. However long, or short, that might be. “He cracked last night. We all knew he’d crack eventually, but he cut it pretty close to the mark!”

 

Of course he’d cracked – she’d threatened to take the Leap without him. And he couldn’t let her do that. He couldn’t let her kill herself alone.

 

That’s what this was, after all, suicide in all but name. Even if no one wanted to admit it, even if they shut him down every time he brought it up.

 

The Leap – teleportation – was only an illusion of continuity. You sit in the chair, close your eyes, and poof, you wake up in another country, a fraction of a second later. But this wasn’t like sending a letter – it was like sending an email.

 

A couple of flight attendants/”Leap” attendants/whatever they’d rebranded themselves as emerged as the gate finally opened. They filed out through a pair of double doors from a brightly lit room, and set themselves up at the desk to check each passenger’s passport and ticket one last time. And for a brief moment, before one of the double doors was shut to ensure people queued and passed through in a proper and orderly manner, Josh caught a glimpse of the machine in question. The object of his reservations. The Leap chair.

 

It was, in essence, a large metal box with three moving parts – two sides which opened outwards and a front that opened upwards, kind of like the doors of a high-spec sports car. The exterior of each of these sides was slick and chrome, the interior was covered in a beehive of hexagonal black lenses – ultra-high-definition scanners which read every part of you, down to the very last hair. The back of the chrome box was snaked through with a nest of interconnecting wires, most of which were thicker than a man’s arm. It took a lot of memory and computational power to transport a living being to the other side of the world, a lot of electrical power, too. And last but not least, inside the box, surrounded by the lights and lenses, was a chair – a comfortable, form-fitting leather chair with armrests and a headrest, and a circular hole in the base of the headrest. This was where the needle pricked you, knocking you out before your Leap.

 

For the person inside, all they felt was a sharp prick, followed by a near-instant, dreamless sleep, and then, when they awoke, they were somewhere new, Australia or France or Tibet. To the observer, the doors closed, a brief flash of light followed from within, and when the doors opened back up, the Leaper had vanished. Gone, as though they were never even there.

 

“Sorry, we’ve got to go,” Amy said, waving goodbye to his family on the phone. “They’ve opened up the gate!”

 

“See you soon!” Dad said.

 

“Ooh, I can’t wait to give you both a big hug!” said Mum.

 

“You all right, Joshy?” said Pips. “You’re looking a little green there.”

 

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “See you real soon.”

 

He ended the call, and they both took their place in the queue. It was a popular one, the Leap to Australia. Seemed half the airport was waiting in line with them.

 

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Amy said, cuddling up to him, holding onto his arm and resting her head on his shoulder.

 

He didn’t answer, only stroked her cheek, ran his fingers through her golden hair, savouring this moment, savouring her, as she was now, as he wanted to remember her.

 

“We can do something special tonight,” Amy whispered. “After the wedding and we’ve said goodnight, when it’s just the two of us, alone.” She kissed his ear, and lowered her voice so only he could hear. “I packed that naughty outfit I wore on our first anniversary. Remember? It still fits. It’s probably waiting for us there already. What do you say? Want to have a little fun tonight?”

 

“Yeah,” Josh said. “I like the sound of that.”

 

But it wouldn’t be them having fun tonight, would it? It would be a copy of them. Doppelgangers with their memories. The real them, the ones cuddling up to each other right now in the airport queue, would be gone. Extinguished in a flash of light. Just like Pips. Just like Mum and Dad, too.

 

Because they’d all seen the videos, hadn’t they? Even if they liked to pretend they hadn’t. The videos that had leaked all over social media three years back.

 

“The Leap ‘Test Footage”, as each snippet had been labelled. They made for a harrowing watch. Couldn’t watch them now, of course, they’d been taken down a couple of days after the first went up, scoured from the internet. But by then it was too late; everyone had seen them.

 

The worst of the worst, and the one that stuck so vividly in Josh’s memory to this day, was labelled “Test Footage #27B” by its original uploader. It showed a man in an American prisoner’s orange jumpsuit strapped to a prototype Leap chair. This wasn’t the slick and stylised final product, but a stripped-back skeleton of a chair, all cold metal and hard edges. Exposed wires coiled around the arms of the chair and trailed along the floor, and denuded scanners were propped up all around it. The man himself had not been sedated. He had been shaved bald and more wires were attached to his head. His darting eyes were stretched so wide you could see the whites all the way around his irises. And he was saying something, screaming something, to someone off-screen, but with no sound and iffy video quality, it was impossible to tell what that was.

 

A few seconds into the video, a switch is flipped and the scan begins. The denuded scanners light up, a couple of wires spark, and the man begins to shake violently. His eyes roll back and his skin begins to smoke. Thick cords stand out on his neck. His synapses are fried one by one as his mind is copied. It’s like watching a man being executed via electric chair.

 

Then, abruptly, it ends, and the man doesn’t disappear. Instead, his head drops forward, and it would be easy to assume he was dead, were it not for his twitching fingers. The camera then pulls back to reveal a second chair and, in a blinding flash, a second man – an exact copy of the first, only as he had looked before the scan – appears and is automatically restrained.

 

For a moment, there are two of him. One, the original, slumped in his chair; the other, the copy, healthy, awake, and terrified. He looks over at himself and screams.

 

Then a shadow of a man off-screen moves, a new switch is flipped, and a second programme is run. The original man is vapourised. Can’t have doubles, for continuity’s sake.

 

The video ended there, and chaos ensued. There were petitions, boycotts, and protests. Stock prices plummeted. The board at British Airways were sent death threats. Airport staff were spat at in the streets. At least one was killed in an altercation gone awry.

 

But then the company fought back. Videos were taken down and message boards were flooded with accounts condemning people for buying into such “obvious trickery”. Experts broke down the “shoddy VFX” and “generative AI” used to produce these impressive but ultimately “fake” clips. News channels ran story after story detailing the safety precautions and the science behind “Taking the Leap”. Various celebrities and even the CEO of the company himself were shown settling into seats and Leaping across continents just to prove that everything was fine, everything was safe. There was nothing to worry about.

 

And within a month or two, the videos were all but forgotten. By everyone, it seemed, except Josh.

 

He’d brought them up last night, but Amy pretended she hadn’t heard. He couldn’t bring them up again now. They were well past the point of arguing.

 

The queue moved ahead of them. He saw the young family from earlier pass through the open door. The mother held the baby to her breast, the father held tight to his son’s hand. One last glimpse, and then they were gone.

 

He squeezed Amy’s shoulder. There was no backing out now.

 

The Leap promised safety, promised continuity, promised that when you step in, the person who steps out on the other side is you, not just some clever copy. But Josh knew better than that. He wasn’t an idiot. He’d done his research, and he knew how this all really worked. And unlike everyone else, he simply couldn’t close his mind to it.

 

The illusion of continuity.

 

And so, he couldn’t help but wonder – once the original brain is scanned and its synapses are fried and fused in the process, once the DNA is digitised, the original person disintegrated cell by cell and reconstructed on the other side, and the copied consciousness is transferred (emailed) across to it, what then? What happens to that copy in the original machine? Is it deleted, essentially killing you twice before you wake up on the other side? Or is it stored away, a snippet of code trapped forever in the hard drives of a cold and lifeless machine? And if so, is that consciousness awake? Is that consciousness still you?

 

This is what they had argued about last night before they went to bed, when Amy threatened to take the Leap alone. She couldn’t understand his fears. To her, it was all so simple.

 

“For argument’s sake,” she’d said. “Seeing as that’s what this is. For argument’s sake, let’s say the Leap doesn’t transport you, doesn’t turn your body into data – an electric charge, ones and zeros, whatever – and pop you – the real, original you – healthy and whole all the way across to the other side of the world. Let’s say it doesn’t—”

 

“It doesn’t,” he had said.

 

“Let’s say it doesn’t. Let’s say it does make a copy of you – your body, your brain, your thoughts, all of you – then sends that copy—”

 

“A copy of that copy.”

 

“—Whatever. Sends that copy to the other side of the world, then disintegrates, deletes, the original… so what? If it’s an exact copy, it is you. If it has your exact DNA, your thoughts, your feelings, your memory, it is you. If that copy remembers sitting in that chair in England and waking up in Australia seconds later as though nothing had happened, it is you. If it remembers our love for each other, or the fact that we sing along with the radio while making pancakes every Sunday morning, or the time we read poetry to each other on the car ride to Wales on our first holiday together, then it is you. There is continuity. A you lives on. Therefore, you are not dead.”

 

He wanted to argue back that the him who sat in the chair would be gone. That the real him, standing before her now, the man who had fallen in love with her, built a life with her, would be sniffed out in an instant. He wanted to tell her they would die. That the people who woke up on the other side would be newly born consciousnesses, and whatever they went on to do next – growing old, having children – would be lost to them. That he wanted to live those experiences, not someone else. Not a clone that thought it was him. But she was crying then, and all at once, all the fight had gone out of him.

 

He would never change his mind, but nor would she. And she would have gone without him if he hadn’t relented, there was no doubt about it. So, he’d promised to drop it, never to bring it up again, and he knew, in that moment, that he loved her completely. A love that, if she was right, would transcend even death.

 

And so here they were, standing in front of their gate as an attendant checked their tickets and passports one last time.

 

“Just a holiday, or something special?” the attendant asked as she handed their items back.

 

“My sister’s wedding!” Amy said, eyes wide and smile beaming. She had always been the more sociable of them both. “Oh, we can’t wait, can we?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“First time taking the Leap?” the attendant asked with a good-natured wink.

 

“How can you tell?” said Amy sarcastically, rolling her eyes in Josh’s direction. “He’s a little nervous, that’s all. But I told him there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”

 

“Nothing at all,” said the attendant, and suddenly her good-natured attitude seemed a little too forced. It wasn’t natural to be that happy all the time. “It’s just like falling asleep.”

 

If you should die before you wake.

 

Amy thanked her and said goodbye, and they followed another attendant through the doors to the final, brightly lit room. It was empty except for two more (decidedly more senior-looking) attendants, and the Leap chair.

 

It opened smoothly, the three sides swinging either up or out without a sound. Red and blue lights lit up around the chair itself, inviting the next passenger to take a seat. Something about the theatrics of it brought to mind a carnivorous plant, luring in its prey.

 

They stopped at the yellow line and waited to be called forward. One of the attendants gave the chair a quick once over, shot a thumbs up to his colleague, then waved Amy over. She was to go first, and Josh was to watch her vanish out of his life. Out of this life.

 

She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “See you on the other side,” she said. Then off she went.

 

The image of a woman walking into the gas chamber reared its ugly head and refused to be quashed.

 

“Please, don’t go,” Josh said. But by then it was too late, Amy had already taken her seat. She never heard him.

 

I love you, she mouthed as she settled back, placed her head against the headrest. If he didn’t know any better, he’d have sworn a flicker of fear darkened her face at that final moment. But he could never be sure, as a second later, the needle did its work and she was fast asleep.

 

The attendant gave another thumbs up and the sides of the machine closed, sealing Amy up in a metal cocoon. A metal coffin. I love you, too, Josh mouthed, and a blinding light shone out through the gaps in the machine. He had to shield his eyes, couldn’t look directly at it. And when the light faded and he could look again, the sides were already reopening, and Amy was gone.

 

The attendant waved him over. “Sir?”

 

Josh’s legs had turned to jelly. They threatened to collapse at any moment, but they moved, pulled forward by the compulsion to always do as those in authority bid us, and the risk of embarrassment if we do not. It was like he was watching over his own shoulder as someone else took the reins.

 

He took his seat, felt his heart thunder in his chest.

 

The attendant looked at him piteously. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “Just sit back, and relax.”

 

Josh did as he was told. He settled back into the chair, felt the leather yield to better support his body, felt the prick at the base of his skull, and embraced oblivion.

 

A leap of faith.

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