Will a transporter fuse two lifeforms together?

Question

In the movie The Fly, a human and a fly are fused together when they are both in a teleport pod during it's activation. Would the same thing happen in Star Trek if two lifeforms were to be transported together?

Answer 1

Not normally but depending on the writer, it could be possible. The thing to remember is that it is a fictional piece of technology with loosely defined rules for how it works, but it also has tendency to break down when a writer wants something terrible to happen to people to create a story element. Like

• breakdown and horribly mutate and kill Commander Sonak and someone in Star Trek: The Motion Picture
• breakdown and merge Tuvok and Neelix, on Voyager's 'Tuvix' (because of some plant though)
• breakdown and make two Will Rikers, TNG 'Second Chances'
• breakdown and split Kirk into good and evil versions, TOS 'The Enemy Within'
• breakdown and send Kirk and people to the mirror universe and vice versa, TOS 'Mirror Mirror'
• still being an experimental phase, they beam Novakovich up off the surface of the planet in Enterprise's 'Strange New World' while in the middle of a storm, and when he materialises leaves are stuck in his skin!

This last item I find to be the most compelling that something like what you are suggesting could happen, without any interference and simply having the transporter malfunction, although that was at an early stage of it's development (Emory Erickson, inventor of the transporter probably has hundreds of horror stories about it's development, like people beaming into solid walls, half-cat/half-dog test subjects, lawsuits because of de-nudification etc etc). But, more closely, simply adding that plant into the mix in 'Tuvix' had a much more similar effect to what you are describing. So find that plant, David Cronenberg and a fly, well....

Answer 2

Yes. It has happened before. The transporter is specifically designed to avoid this, however, so it is a freak occurrence.

Answer 3

Something to remember: TOS had transporter malfunctions as a common occurrence for a plot device. Similarly, TNG had holodeck malfunctions, but by then the transporter was generally fairly well established tech. There were also plenty of examples in TNG where two people were touching or even gripping one another and teleported in situ, able to separate afterward with no problem.

I would, however, point out that there is a distinct difference between physically fusing two bodies together and what happened in The Fly. Paraphrasing from The Fly "Something went wrong. The computer was designed to work with only one body, not two, so it did the best it could." In The Fly, the main character's body (including genes) become a fusion of the two bodies, but simply attached to each other.

Tangentially, The Fly II (which I coincidentally watched last night) doesn't offer the slightest explanation for any of this- why it used to work, why it stopped working, how the problem was fixed (I'm sorry but "The scientists couldn't do it because they couldn't see the beauty of it" is not an explanation). There, though, it was dealing purely with genetic expression of (sort-of) junk DNA. Incidentally, why a live body was required I don't know- I would argue that he killed more than enough people in the final scene for it to be easy to find a body to take the morphs.

So, I've meandered this a little bit, but the explanation from the movies seems to be that the computer combines the genetic code of the two creatures to make a fusion creature, rather than physically attaching them together.

Answer 4

I think it is actually a fairly plausible behavior for a device that is able to take a living, moving (the subject's heart is beating and there are numerous microscopic processes going on) creature and rematerialize it in another location, still alive and not just identical to the subject but is in fact the subject.

This implies to me that the transporter has a fundamental understanding of the processes necessary for life -- it is insufficient to simply move (or copy -- we really don't know if the the transporter is destructive or not) ever particle into the target pod (In The Fly).

So the merging of the two species is the transporter making its best guess about how to deal with two separate lifeforms so that both creatures continue to function once transported.

I think what the writer had in mind (and iirc this is mentioned in the remake) is that there is more to a living being than just the sum of its parts -- there is some "magic" that the transporter can't quite understand well enough to deal with the unexpected presence of the fly in the pod.

Note that even without the fly, a multicellular organism is made up of many separate organisms, for example, gut bacteria that need to be faithfully copied or transported and apparently the device can handle bacteria without merging their dna with a humans. It is a separate and external organism that threw it off.

I think basically the scientist really blundered, not taking into account the possibility of, for example, a fly being unnoticed in the pod -- it seems to me that in a later version of the software, detecting a fly, etc. would be enough to simply abort the teleportation. I bet Seth Brundle wishes he had spent a little more time thinking things through.

Answer 5

It shouldn't

Although it has happened, (e.g. in the previously mentioned Voyager episode, Tuvix), things like that are the result of accidents or anomalies which are as common as you'd expect in a programme with hundreds of episodes where something has to go wrong in every one of them.

However, we see it working as per design in the the movie, The Voyage Home (at least for Klingon transporters - but there's no reason to believe Federation ones are any different). Gillian grabs and clings onto Kirk while he is being transported onto The Bounty, gets caught in the same beam as him, and both arrive safely on board. As far as I remember, in an episode of The Next Generation, Barclay was able to rescue people trapped in a transporter, without the risk of being fused with them, bringing them back in the same beam. (And I'm sure there must be at least one episode of a character rescuing another by bringing their unconscious body through the same beam as them but I can't think of a specific one)

In any case, there is no reason why it should. The thing that comes out of the beam is an exact copy (if you call it a copy) of the thing that went in, right down to exact configuration of their molecules.

The transporter isn't building a new person based on its own knowledge of how a person works, just using the DNA of the person who went in. So it would no more fuse two people than it would fuse a person and their clothes / something they were carrying, or their body parts together.

Answer 6

I would expect that two people would simply fuse into each other and the resulting mass would die almost instantly due to blood vessels and veins being blocked off by the matter of the other person, down to the very cells unable to function again because of being blocked off inside.

Also, how come the writers didn't simply have the transporter phase someone whole body out of normal space and place them elsewhere via a (subspace?) tractorbeam vs. trying to take someone apart at the quantum level and reassembling him/her thousands of miles away? The first is far more realistic. The tractor beam can even contain an air pocket so aphyxiation would not be a problem