Our Quantum Detective Works Her Board

Aware of her own ambiguities
As a cloned operative undercover,
Our DCI voices a quip while sussing out
Theories upon her virtual white board:
“You can’t be in two places at once.”
Yet she scrawls in luminous marker:
By quantum information theory the state
Of a particle can be replicated at
A distance from its relative location.

Then red highlights: relative.
So she challenges the incident room.
“If we can isolate every particle
Of our bodies then replicate elsewhere,
Can our suspect be temporally dual?”
Her lead DI: “You mean teleportation.
That’s just no good of course
Without a plan on the other end
To put Humpty together again.”
Another DI: “And after could you/they
Truly be the exact same person.”
Our DCI writes out, Can we prosecute a copy?
Which of them would be the guilty party?

But what she’s really thinking is
—I’m leading a dual life here on duty.—
Like the two-state qubit with a value
Of one or zero depending on the spin,
What outcome will she end up in?
Accepted or rejected.


—Robert Frazier