[Fiction] One Giant Leap...

[Prof. Sydney 'Photon' Holland]

Sydney stared at the other side of the training room. This time I'm going to do it.

He closed his eyes, and focused his thoughts.

Every photon is identical. Sydney opened his eyes, and let the quantum power around him diffuse. The only thing that makes them different is the information carried upon them. The corner of the room began to darken slightly as Sydney began to take control of the photons.

When I control a photon, all I'm doing is rewriting the information. Sydney began to coalesce the photons in the other corner into a vaguely human-shape. Thus, my body, being merely photons controlled by me, is information. The cloud of photons began to shift itself into a facsimile of Sydney's form.

Since every photon is identical, my body may use any photons, as long as they are under my control. Sydney got ready to take the great leap that had failed every other time before. He began to visualise his mind, his control, moving from his current photon cloud to the new photon cloud. All I have to do is make the leap. He closed his eyes. He focused. And then he did the scariest thing he ever had to do. He let go of his old body.

A bright flash occurred as his old body vanished. As the flash dissipated, Sydney realised that he hadn't properly held on to the holographic projection. With his body gone, only his mind remained. In a blind panic, Sydney opened his mind's eyes. A massive cacophony of images and sights flooded his consciousness. The confusion of images were flooding his very baseline mind, and it couldn't cope.

Sydney fought against the tide of images, struggling to maintain the last vestiges of his personality. Then, it happened. His mind began perceiving patterns, strange correspondences between given images, until it became clear that several viewpoints were merely fighting for attention. Suddenly, he realised that his vision was everywhere. Not just seeing the whole room, but every point in that room was the position of his eyesight, seeing the rest of the room. He could see the flash of his old body fading, the new body waiting, the flicker of the fluorescent lights above, the waves of light emanating from every surface of the training room, as well as riding on every photon, seeing photons disappear to trade places with photons in other location, entangled in their quantum webs. It was a heady experience.

With order achieved, Sydney began to redirect his energies. With the ability to see everything in every way, he had a perfect view of his new body. Inside, outside, around, everywhere, right down to the quantum expression of that holographic body. Sydney worked further, realising that without his mental control, the body was beginning to lose cohesion. And worse, without a body, his mind was losing cohesion.

Sydney, in a speed remarkable for a baseline mind, quickly realised how to gain possession of this new body – simply reverse the process he used to let go of his old body. He filtered out the perceptions of the rest of the room, focusing purely on the hologram in the corner of the room. As he restricted his view, he began to get more and more intimate with the hologram. Visualising his Quantum mind encompassing the hologram, he closed his eyes, concentrated, and latched on to his lifeline...

...And then opened his eyes again. The vision of a single viewpoint reigned supreme, and the vision was of the flash that signalled the decay of his old body. As his mind began to calm down from the perceptual high he had just experienced, his rationality returned to the fore, and he realised that the entire experience had taken less than one second.

That's when he also realised exactly what had just happened. I almost died.

Strangely, it didn't seem to have the same impact as he expected it to. Maybe... Maybe I just knew what was going to happen.

Maybe.

Sydney stood in place for some time before he was ready to move. I almost died.

As he walked out, the strangest head went through his head. Ah well, not like that's not happened before...