The Horror of Eternal Consciousness | The Jaunt by Stephen King

Transcript

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Hi guys, it's Quinn here. If you appreciate my content, consider hitting the like buttons, the only way the YouTube algorithm notices me. The Jaunt by Stephen King is a short story set sometime around the year 2300. By this time, humankind has begun the colonization of our solar system. This was made possible by a world-changing piece of technology invented in the 80s. The jaunt. The word jaunt was first used in Alfred Bester's 1956 science fiction novel, The Stars My Destination. In this novel, humans have access to personal teleporters. Teleporting was referred to as jaunting in this novel. Stephen King takes the idea of the jaunt and twists it into something not merely dark, but horrifying beyond comprehension. The idea of teleportation has been common in science fiction for many decades, and the fears associated with it are not unexplored. Cronenberg's famous The Fly explores the horror of a teleportation experiment gone wrong in which the main character's DNA is accidentally mixed with an insect. Teleporters have featured prominently in Star Trek since its original release in 1965, and it's never been fully clear if the teleporters allow for a continuous stream of consciousness, or if they are simply killing the original person and rematerializing an exact copy with copied memories in a different place. The Jaunt also considers what becomes of consciousness during teleportation, but in a different way. To understand, you have to learn how the jaunt was first invented in this story by a man named Victor Karoon. In this story, man begins to run out of oil. And this, of course, leads to a huge energy crisis. It mentions that 10,000 people in America froze one year because there was nothing they could do to heat their homes. The jaunt was instrumental in solving this energy crisis because there was oil on Mars. Victor Karun was a scientist who had a contract with the government. He basically invented the jaunt by accident. First, he teleports his fingers. Pushing them through the threshold and pulling them back, he's fine. Then he teleports a pencil, and then keys, then a watch, and then a mouse. But the mouse is where things get really, really weird. Karoon touched the mouse. It was like touching something inert. Packed straw or sawdust, perhaps, except for the aspirating sides. The mouse did not look around at Karoon. It stared straight ahead. He had thrown in a squirming, very frisky and alive little animal. Here was something that seemed to be a living waxwork likeness of a mouse. Karoon snapped his fingers in front of the mouse's small pink eyes. It blinked and fell dead on its side. Karoon's measurements indicated that no time distortion happened between the time of entering the jaunt and the time of leaving it, at least not physically. And yet, all living creatures who were jaunted ultimately died, even though physically they appeared perfectly healthy. Sensory input, he thought almost randomly. When they go through, they see something, hear something, touch something. God maybe even smell something that literally kills them. What? What became of consciousness when crossing through the jaunt? What lied within that space between that was so terrible that life simply gave up upon re-entering the physical realm? The animals could not speak, but a human could. When the government got wind of what Karoon was doing, it was only a matter of time before human trials would begin, and of course they used prisoners. Karoon basically figured out that if you sent an animal or a person through sleeping, then when they came through on the other side, they were fine. But they still wanted to know what would happen if you sent a person in awake. So they got a man named Rudy Faja to volunteer. He was a prisoner sentenced to death who had murdered a bunch of people. And in exchange for doing the jaunt awake, they would allow him to leave and be let free of all charges if he survived. He came through alive. But Rudy Faja was in no condition to eat his chicken dinner. In the space it took to jaunt across two miles, pegged at 0.00000000067th of a second by a computer, Faja's hair had turned snow white. His face had not changed in any physical way. It was not lined or jolly or wasted, but it gave the impression of great, almost incredible age. Fagia shuffled out of the portal, his eyes bulging blankly, his mouth twitching, his hands splayed out in front of him. Presently he began to drool. The scientists who had gathered around him drew away, and no, Mark really doubted if any of them had talked. They knew about the rats, after all, and the guinea pigs, and the hamsters, any animal, in fact, with more brains than your average flatworm. They must have felt a bit like those German scientists who tried to impregnate Jewish women with the sperm of German shepherds. What happened? One of the scientists shouted. It was the only question that Fajia had a chance to answer. It's eternity in there, he said, and dropped dead of what was diagnosed as a massive heart attack. The scientist four gathered there were left with his corpse, and that strange and awful dying declaration. It's eternity in there. Now, if you saw my Halloween special from last month, then you know that all of Stephen King's books are connected in a giant macroverse. And other Stephen King stories like it do mention that people's hair turns white when they look into the macroverse because of the cosmic madness of it all. But I think there's also another implication here. I think that what consciousness actually comes face to face with within the jaunt is eternity itself. A single mind, no body, all alone in infinite nothingness for an eternity. In that time, the mind begins to cannibalize itself. The body is transported instantaneously, but the mind is left in this void, with only itself for an eternity, and is suddenly snapped back into existence, and it caves in upon itself. By the year 2300, traveling through use of the jaunt is common. It is how we have colonized planets, but all travelers still have to be put to sleep with a gas before traveling. In the beginning of this story, we are introduced to a man who is about to travel with his family through use of the jaunt, and he recounts the story of Victor Karoon to his children, explaining that the reason they are put to sleep is because eternity waits for them should they remain conscious. Hearing this and knowing this, his twelve-year-old son develops a deadly case of curiosity. And upon the completion of the jaunt, they all awake to find something devastating. Beside Ricky, his sister still mercifully slept. The thing that had been his son bounced and writhed in its jaunt couch. A twelve-year-old boy with a snow white fall of hair and eyes which were incredibly ancient. The cornea is gone a sickly yellow. Here was a creature older than time, masquerading as a boy, and yet it bounced and writhed with a kind of horrid, obscene glee, and its choked, lunatic cackles. The jaunt attendants drew back in terror. Some of them fled, although they had been trained to cope with just such an unthinkable eventuality. The old young legs twitched and quivered, clawed hands beat and twisted and danced on the air. Abruptly they descended, and the thing that had been his son began to claw at its face. Longer than you think, Dad, it cackled. Longer than you think. Held my breath when they gave me the gas. I wanted to see. I saw, I saw, longer than you think. Cackling and screeching, the thing on the jaunt couch suddenly clawed its own eyes out, blood gouted. The recovery room was an aviary of screaming voices now. Longer than you think, Dad. I saw long, jaunt, longer than you think. It said other things before the jaunt attendants were finally able to bear it away, rolling its couch swiftly away as it screamed and clawed at its eyes that had seen the unseeable forever and ever. It said other things, and then it began to scream. But Mark Oates didn't hear it, because by then he was screaming himself. So, we've heard the notion that consciousness exists because there is at some point some being that contained all of consciousness. And because it was alone being the only thing, it split itself so that it would no longer be alone. Imagine being just a mind in nothing for eternity. No body, no stimulus, just existence. The human mind was meant to exist for about 80 years and then end. It wasn't meant to be stretched thin across all of eternity. I really love this story because it's about technology and the risks and fears associated with it, and it also has that element of cosmic horror, the unthinkable, looking into the unknowable and being scarred by it, and that's of course a very Lovecraftian idea. So the Skeleton Crew is a great collection of stories. It also includes The Mist, which I talked about in my Halloween special. Definitely check it out if you like these kinds of stories. Thanks so much for watching, guys. If you'd like to do more to keep this channel afloat, consider donating through the PayPal link in the description or checking out our Patreon. Thanks, guys, so much.