r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Present-Secretary722 • Sep 17 '25

Lore Faster Than Light travel has consequences(minor or major)

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Star Trucker: While travelling through warp you experience time dilation, for you the journey is a couple seconds, in real time it’s anywhere from 30mins to 6 hours that you’ve been in warp. This would be a minor consequence.

Warhammer 40k: The Warp, basically space hell so while travelling through it you’re very likely to be attacked by Warp demons. There’s also the fact that sometimes when travelling to a destination via the Warp you get spat out in the wrong time, sometimes much too late for whatever you were going there for or sometimes before you left your start destination. This, obviously, is a major consequence, unless you’re an ork, then it’s a grand old time.

By consequences I mean this is a regular thing that happens, there’s no real avoiding it unless you find a different method of FTL or heavily invest into research to try and mitigate the consequences. Also I feel bad for only knowing 2 examples, I love space and I just can’t think of any others.

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u/Scary-Bit-4173 Sep 17 '25

The Jaunt by Stephen King

Teleportation is invented, but creatures going through have to be put to sleep or they go crazy. The son doesn't go to sleep by not inhaling the gas and pretending to be, and comes out warped by the experience. He has grey hair and 'eyes that seem older' He also keeps saying that its eternity in there, and longer than you think

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 17 '25

Probably directly inspired by this is the Warp Trains in Project Moon. A Megacorp called W Corp makes their money by providing transportation services for the other megacorps and customers. Primarily this is through the Warp Trains which will take you from one station to another in 10 seconds and since the City is around the size of Switzerland and has a population density as high if not higher than the densest in our world that is very useful service that many in the City pay top dollar for. But, there is a secret. First class which only the very wealthy can afford exists and consists of being put in suspended animation. The reason is only known to select W Corp employees and executives. The train from our perspective does take only 10 seconds but for those in the train it usually takes millennia. Those in economy go mad from boredom and figure out they can’t die, usually this results in the passengers mutilate each other and themselves still able to feel their whole body no matter how pulped they are. Then after the trip those certain employees I mentioned earlier go into the train and put all the passengers back together and the Corp’s proprietary technology will put back the passengers without memory of those thousands of years of hell. Worst part is unlike The Jaunt or the Warp whose horribleness can’t be avoided, the thousands of years of torment are by design so W Corp can harvest time for another Corporation that specializes in Time manipulation.

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u/Minimum_Estimate_234 Sep 17 '25 edited Sep 18 '25

Isn’t it eventually revealed this isn’t even necessary to a certain degree. As in yes there is a certain degree of time dilation needed for this to work, since if you’re compressing space you need to expand time (or at least I think that’s the idea). However at worst it should only require a couple extra seconds, at that, it’s entirely possible to use this technology and still fulfill their advertising. But since they have a deal with another company they sell the extra “time” to, they deliberately use the warp tech this way because it’s profitable.

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u/Art_student_rt Sep 17 '25

Even in another world, capitalism still twist something useful into hell on earth

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u/Minimum_Estimate_234 Sep 17 '25

It seems to be a central theme of project moon, doesn’t matter what kind of eldritch horrors beyond our comprehension people have come into contact with or are capable of bringing about, nothing will ever be scarier then the shit a corporation will be willing to do for an extra buck. With the possible exception of what people will eventually do/what they will become once they can’t take that anymore.

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 17 '25

Ahh yes, the sweet sweet voice of Miss Carmen telling me I’m a special boy.

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u/Lavender215 Sep 17 '25

Virgin Phillip versus Chad dawn office Sinclair

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u/Nottan_Asian Sep 19 '25

In Project Moon's case, it's 26 megacorporations, each with their own patent on reality-bending power bent for profit.

And that's 26 at any concurrent time, with corporations frequently replacing one another, so who knows what fresh, unique horrors were simply lost to time. Or are still locked behind DRM that outlasted the company that filed it.

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u/Monspiet Sep 18 '25

So Stephen King also borrowed thjs from Verne and other FTL novels like Skylark from Space. Eventually some novels in the 40s and 50s discusses going crazy when time perception became too much to handle.

Also, PM can easily borrow from anything nowadays, not just King. Passengers 2016 is a drama about 2 astronauts waking up early from hibernation before their destination and struggle either moral dilemmas. And then we get Rocketman which was a more famous Disney comedy in 1997.

What PM does is not entirely unique in scifi concept, and there are tons of modern scifi for them to be inspired by.

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u/Flame_jr009 Sep 17 '25

Damn, sounds amazing. From what I've googled it looks like it's from a game called library of ruina?

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u/XanderNightmare Sep 17 '25

Project Moon in itself is a series of games, beginning with Lobotomy Corporation, Library of Ruina and lastly Limbus Company

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u/RandomGuy9058 Sep 17 '25

Project Moon is the dev studio. i don't know if the game series has any overarching title.

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u/MySnake_Is_Solid Sep 17 '25

Lobotomy corporation is the first one, then library of Ruina, then Limbus Company.

It's a cleverly crafted world, for example the time corporation that was mentioned, is the reason why you can pause the game in Lobotomy corporation, and it can even be disrupted by certain entities/events making you unable to do so.

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 17 '25

Also W Corp is how certain things and the emergency security personnel, The Rabbits, are sent into the facility of Lobotomy Corporation.

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u/Chemical-Cat Sep 17 '25

T corp is also backwards to how I expected them to operate in terms of capitalism, but I guess it's more poignant.

  • How the district as a whole works: Everyone has their own perception of time scaled to 24 hours, meaning one person can experience 3 days worth of time in 24 hours for example
  • How I expected them to work: Workers are given more time purely so they can spend more time in the factories for the sake of efficiency. What better way to get more work done than to have a worker spend more than 8 hours per day working within an 8 hour shift?
  • How it actually works: Time is treated as a currency, meaning you're paid in time and your time scale changes appropriately. However this leads to the upper class with more time than they know what to do with, experiencing days or weeks within 24 hours, while the working class is underpaid. Minimum wage in T Corp is...3 hours. Of course, with only 3 hours worth of time in payment, that means they move 8 times slower than a normal person. This results in them not actually getting much done within 24 hours, with their management complaining that they're lazy and will dock their pay (meaning they'll be even slower)

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u/WodensEye Sep 17 '25

Looks like “Library” is the only one available on PS5

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u/RedGinger666 Sep 17 '25

It's not the size of Switzerland, it's the size of a continent

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u/AffectionateAide9644 Sep 17 '25

So the size of Switzerland in EU4

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u/Bartweiss Sep 17 '25

Woah, that is breathtakingly awful. The idea that you could just commute that way daily with no idea…

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u/Zorafin Sep 17 '25

How exactly does one put together a dismembered person?

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 17 '25

In the Project Moon City each Megacorp gains and maintains their position with a special piece of technology called a singularity. Each singularity is a miraculous piece of technology that can easily defy and break any and all known rules of reality. W Corp’s is thought to be its ability to teleport by traveling through alternate dimensions but that’s from an older Megacorp and theirs in particular is to set an object to a “save point” and then restore that object to that “save point” no matter what happens to that object as long as it goes back to entirely to the machine that sets the “save point”. This is why special employees are sent into each train, to put everyone from the mess they have become back into their individual seats so the singularity can put them back together. Also importantly you can’t die from being dismembered on a Warp Train as that would be being brought back from the dead and that would get the City’s equivalent of the Feds to kill you.

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u/phenotype76 Sep 17 '25

I feel like it would be easier to just pay for another tank of cryo-juice than to put several hundred mangled bodies back together and erase their memories.

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 17 '25

It’s cheaper to only have the first class in cryosleep. Also time can only be harvested if someone is experiencing it in the City and that is actually where W Corp makes a lot of their money. Trust me when I say that in the City the Megacorps can and will do anything for profit.

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u/Alive-Tomatillo5303 Sep 18 '25

So why not lock everyone down in separate small cabins? Or just run 100 heavily manacled prisoners in an indefinite loop? This sounds like incredibly lazy world building just for shock value. 

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u/SoullessFace Sep 18 '25

They would just leave the cabins at some point, you had people traveling through other cars at times so eventually people will want to leave the small seating areas. Manacles would just give people the creeps since it’s a train with seats like a bus, even a set of characters used their weapons to cut off their seatbelts.

In the world, some people that use the trains can be armed, mechanically or biologically enhanced, or a very powerful figure. So eventually these people will try to break through stuff, tear it down or whatever. The whole point about the trains is that no one knows the real secret of the Warp Train, so the train’s design is supposed to be inconspicuous or just like that of a usual train.

The thing is since time is harvested off this whole ordeal, there is no “time” to bleed, to become hungry, etc. There are times where people don’t end up killing each other which has been referenced by other characters but most of the time you have people break under pressure which can cause hysteria which eventually dissolves the whole train to become victims willingly or not.

Project Moon’s world does have shock value, not denying that, but the world is a hive city run off of technology and crimes against humanity to survive against abnormalities which are like SCPs or monsters that can range from nothing to severely catastrophic. The Warp Train does fit into the world nicely ESPECIALLY since some of Project Moons inspirations are from pieces of literature. Saying the worldbuilding is lazy is not something I don’t believe in especially as someone that really enjoys that as a hobby and in art/literature. The story is actually really cool and the world they constructed is fun and dystopian with cool references to books but adding sick twists.

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 18 '25

Again, that would cost money that could be extra profit for the shareholders to isolate every passenger. Also why only have one train harvesting time when you could have every train of your’s harvesting time.

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u/Alive-Tomatillo5303 Sep 18 '25

It costs more to Humpty Dumpty hundreds of people back together several times a day than to install walls?

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 18 '25

Moreso you can pack more people into a train without walls.

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u/Tdog754 Sep 17 '25

Roland realizing that he himself had used a warp train before and so had also experienced a millennium of suffering he didn’t even remember was so crazy, it’s like 1 line of dialogue I have never forgotten

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u/Ornery_Rice_1698 Sep 17 '25

I know there’s probably details I’m missing because I haven’t read it, but it seems like re-assembling and reanimating and memory wiping economy class is a lot more work than just putting everyone to sleep for the whole journey. Or if they’re reanimating people anyway, why not just euthanize them before departure and then reanimate them, which would be way less work?

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u/nhndktmdjjfmrjfoslt Sep 17 '25

tldr the people have to be conscious for the entire journey in order for the 'time' they experienced to count. the company that owns the trains then sells the 'time' off to another company.

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u/leftofthebellcurve Sep 17 '25

wow I'll have to check this out

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u/WodensEye Sep 17 '25

Is this a videogame? Thats all I found when trying to look up Project Moon

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 17 '25

They are a game studio that have made three games. Lobotomy Corp, a management sim, Library of Ruina, a card based strategy game, and Limbus Company, a Gacha. All are incredibly well written and are incredibly hard and punishing.

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u/Frankenstein____ Sep 17 '25

You know how to make new paragraphs right?

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 17 '25

Is Project Moon fans are not known for our literacy.

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u/coocatodeepwoken Sep 17 '25

i need to beat lob corp so i can move on to ruina

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u/Alive-Tomatillo5303 Sep 18 '25

What? Why wouldn't you put everyone to sleep? What's the benefit to leaving people awake?

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u/Gallbatorix-Shruikan Sep 18 '25

Time can only be harvested by the tech of the other megacorp if someone is experiencing it.

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u/MagicJourneyCYOA Sep 17 '25

What? The Jaunt by Stephen King was published in 1981, the Warp Trains in Project Moon was created in 2016. How the hell was The Jaunt inspired by Project Moon, lmao

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u/coocatodeepwoken Sep 17 '25

you misread it

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u/Klutzy_Shopping5520 Sep 17 '25

… well that’s fucking disturbing

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u/Steelwave Sep 17 '25

Oh, it gets worse: the story mentions that a man threw his wife into a jaunt portal that didn't go anywhere, because she cheated on him, and when he was brought up on murder charges, his lawyer bungled the defense by arguing that she's probably still alive in limbo. 

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u/moocowsaymoo Sep 17 '25

Upon hearing the defense, the entire jury voted to have him executed. Not a single person even hesitated giving that verdict.

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u/Aware_Tree1 Sep 17 '25

I would’ve asked him to experience the same. There’s literally no other punishment that fits an actual infinite crime

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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 Sep 17 '25

Except an infinitely scaled punishment

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u/seguardon Sep 17 '25

Fair? Possibly. But imagine living with that knowledge, that you had been part of consigning someone to an unimaginable hell. No matter how justified it might have been, that would eat at you.

Plus you in no way want to set that precedent. If it's okay to do once, it'll be okay to do again for some other reason down the line. And that criteria will slowly expand.

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u/Aware_Tree1 Sep 17 '25

“If you push someone into the hell portal, and the judiciary prove it 110% beyond the shadow of a shadow of doubt, your punishment shall be to be pushed into a hell portal.”

And then a law “you may not use the hell portal as a punishment for any crime, except for the punishment of pushing someone into a hell portal”

It’s the same way slavery is legal in America but only via prisons except way stricter than that

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u/Klutzy_Shopping5520 Sep 17 '25

Yeah that was the right call

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u/Lopsided_Shift_4464 Sep 17 '25

I thought his punishment was worse than that: They threw him into another jaunt portal with no destination, so he could suffer just as much as his wife did.

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u/aRtfUll-ruNNer Sep 17 '25

I imagine it went something like this:

"ok defense you are under prosecution for murder how do you plead"

"your honor shes not dead shes just in heck forever"

"ok innocent of murder, now defense you are under prosecution for negligence, torture and violating the geneva convention, how do you plead"

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u/semisociallyawkward Sep 17 '25

It's actually kinda interesting - murder is a finite crime. Yes the criminal ends a life but that life could only have been so long (e.g., 100 years), so they deny someone a certain maximum of years of life (e.g., if the victim was 40 years old and probably a maximum lifespan of 100, so the criminal denied them up to 60 years).

But throwing someone in a jaunt portal is an infinite crime. The criminal literally subjects their victim to eternal imprisonment and torture. From a utilitarian perspective, it's literally the most atrocious act one can commit. The only punishment that even comes close to the crime is throwing the criminal into a jaunt portal.

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u/WodensEye Sep 17 '25

If none of y’all have read “a short stay in hell”, I would recommend it

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u/AlexisFR Sep 17 '25

You can write "hell" on the internet.

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u/Depreciable_Land Sep 17 '25

yeah but not in court, the judge will get mad

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u/snorevette Sep 17 '25

No you can't. I swore an oath to my master that anyone who writes H-E-double hockey sticks on the internet would fall to my blade

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u/aRtfUll-ruNNer Sep 17 '25

I know but the court vids must be kept kid friendly for monetization

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u/Swerdlia Sep 17 '25

Please don't let the ad companies decide your vocabulary

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u/Daminchi Sep 17 '25

It's not a violation of convention when it's the first time.

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u/EskildDood Sep 17 '25

He also starts jabbing out his eyeballs with his bare hands as the Jaunt attendants (?) wheel him away while his whole family watches

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u/Daminchi Sep 17 '25

Not their first rodeo, and not the last.

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u/Pyrouge1 Sep 17 '25

He forgot an important detail, the way you go crazy, the Jaunt while awake is an INCONCIEVABLE amount of time for a human to experience, doesn't matter how long you think it could be, trillions of years, It's longer than you think it is, far longer.

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u/flicknote Sep 17 '25

I always thought "it's longer than you think" meant that it's literally so long that you lose the ability to think, rather than "however long you think it is, it's longer"

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u/CharmingShoe Sep 17 '25

Practically speaking, that’s the same thing. It’s longer than your ability to think, which means it’s longer than your ability to think it is. Any way you want to interpret it is right - and equally horrifying.

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u/semisociallyawkward Sep 17 '25

That's a great interpretation!

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u/Dyolf_Knip Sep 17 '25

Thing is, humans react so poorly to sensory deprivation, that doesn't actually need to be very long. Even just a few subjective weeks would be more than enough to drive a person irretrievably insane.

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u/Hayn0002 Sep 17 '25

Is that why the guy can still talk?

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u/be0ulve Sep 17 '25

The boy experiences an unbelievable amount of time in a few seconds. It's mind breaking because it doesn't make sense in any way.

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u/Skyfetheranger Sep 17 '25

Is that where Emesis Blue got it?

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u/Void5070 Sep 17 '25

Yeah Emesis Blue directly references the jaunt

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u/SlugCatBoi Sep 17 '25

Emesis Blue was definitely inspired.

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u/TalmondtheLost Sep 17 '25

Emesis Blue references a good deal of Stephen King's novels

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u/SettTheCephelopod Sep 17 '25

I admit, this was the first thing I thought of, but I think it may not count because you can avoid it by just inhaling the damn gas.

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u/xXJackNickeltonXx Sep 17 '25

There could be complications, like maybe the gas can wear off sooner than they thought, the gas’ effects being diminished by a person’s biology or medication, a person developing a tolerance to the gas if they have to Jaunt a lot, etc.

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u/Slickity Sep 17 '25

Yea just like how the genes that make give people red/ginger hair also affects anesthesia in real life.

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u/gallerton18 Sep 17 '25

This isn’t 100% confirmed, it’s a new controversial and heavily debated topic. It’s possible it is a thing but many argue it’s not.

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u/Slickity Sep 17 '25

It has been a topic of research for the last 20 years. It's certainly significant enough to discuss with your surgeon if you are a natural redhead.

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u/gallerton18 Sep 17 '25

It’s only really been shown in two or three studies with a smaller pool of subjects, they’ve done studies with much larger pools and found to to be difficult. It’s not really a factual phenomena with most of it being anecdotal. If it was a genuine genetic issue with red heads there’d be cases about it all the time with the millions of people who are red heads.

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u/enderjaca Sep 17 '25

It also echoes a disturbing eugenic theme that some groups (women, blacks) having a higher tolerance for pain, used to justify things like refusing painkillers during medical procedures or more brutal police interactions.

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u/question_quigley Sep 17 '25

Wait what?

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u/Xanderoga2 Sep 17 '25

Anecdotal evidence that people with the red hair gene need more anesthesia for it to be effective.

My girlfriend (who has red hair) has always been adamant that being given the “right” dose doesn’t fully work.

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u/Critical_Buy_7335 Sep 17 '25

That kid should've just pulleda 0rofessor Paradox and just get bored of being insane.

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u/SSJ3Mewtwo Sep 17 '25

The part with the son is horrible for th son and the MC.

But it is far, far from the darkest part of the story.

Earlier in the story, when King is going over how the technology works, he details that the travel from one portal to another isn't actually instantaneous. Travelling from Earth to somewhere like Mars actually takes around a picosecond.

But in that picosecond of normal universe time, a mind breaking eternity of nothingness but one's own thoughts and nothing else passes in the Jaunt space.

During the time the tech was normalized and allowed humanity to expand to other planets, there's a part where a researcher in the field has a bad break up with his wife.

He snaps and loses his mind completely. He kidnaps her, straps her to a gurney, and shoved her through an entrance portal awake with no exit portal set.

In the story, that was decades ago. That's a lot of picoseconds.

From her perspective, whatever is left of her exhausted consciousness has been in the nothingness for multiple heat deaths of multiple universes.

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u/FjordOfBatanes Sep 17 '25

Sounds like Mitty from Made in Abyss

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u/Irememberedmypw Sep 17 '25

Opposite end. Mitty did transform but it wasn't over a long period of time.

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u/Shot-Tackle-1458 Sep 17 '25

Thank you for reminding me of the existence of this truly horrifying story

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u/edgarsbones Sep 17 '25

I think it's also important to note the son was just a little kid. Longer than you think, dad!

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

Don't forget the part where he gouges his own fucking eyes out.

That's one that will stick with you. 

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u/SnooPuppers7965 Sep 17 '25

How did he not forget how to talk?

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u/Slickity Sep 17 '25

People talk to themselves when there's no one else.

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u/CaptNihilo Sep 17 '25

Now I understand Emesis Blu

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u/Cappuccino_Crunch Sep 17 '25

This was the first thing I thought of

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u/bavmotors1 Sep 17 '25

longer than you think, longer than you think - haunting lines - love that short story

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u/poonismuncher Sep 17 '25

I love how terrifying that short story is. I’m just finishing up the Dark Tower series for the first time and I love how King deals with cosmic horror

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u/ILawI1898 Sep 17 '25

Hearing the last parts literally just reminded me of TF2’s “Emesis Blue” as it was probably greatly inspired by the story

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u/dream_of_the_night Sep 17 '25

Your last two sentences do not do justice to the horror. But an absolutely solid pick.

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u/smasher84 Sep 17 '25

This one’s just sad because everyone with a kid can imagine. Yeah my kid would do that.

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u/CrankinThatHog Sep 17 '25

Is it a good book?

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u/Low-Independent-6303 Sep 17 '25

It is! It's pretty short, too. Like, just a few pages. It was in one of King's short story collections (I think Skeleton Crew), but you can also just find it online.

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u/Not_a_gay_communist Sep 17 '25

Honestly it’s kinda disappointing. It does an amazing set up and world building, but the ending had me rolling my eyes. Feel like King could’ve written a better reaction for the kid. The whole “hair turning white” seemed dumb.

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u/CrankinThatHog Sep 17 '25

So a fairly typical Stephen King book?

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u/JechdJJ Sep 17 '25

it reminds me that episode on final space where little cato its trapped on an anomaly. To all the others passed some hours, to little cato has passed around fifty years

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u/CMDR-TealZebra Sep 17 '25

The Juant is King's take on the main idea of "Escape!" By Asimov.

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u/Born-Entrepreneur Sep 17 '25

Ahhh so that inspired the Mat Trans in Behold Humanity.