Thomas Riker isn’t a transporter duplicate, he’s a kidnap victim from a parallel dimension.
Thomas Riker supposedly proved that the transporter can be used to duplicate sentient living beings. So why aren’t there mass-produced transporter duplicates? There are plenty of unscrupulous powers that would love to exploit this existential loophole and create huge armies of Jem Hadar or some such. They would have no ethical limitations on making such things, and broadly speaking if a scientific / engineering problem CAN be solved then it WILL be solved, and doubly more so when someone proves that it definitely CAN be solved.
Because the theory of his creation is wrong. He wasn’t duplicated by the interference field, his transport beam was filtered through a parallel dimension and back, and captured Thomas from his home dimension and dropped him in ours. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, we know that transporter fuckery can cause trans-dimensional transporting. When they discovered Thomas, they got the interpretation of the phenomenon wrong, and set everyone on a drastically wrong path of research. His duplication hasn’t been duplicated, because he was never duplicated to begin with.
Thomas Riker isn’t a transporter duplicate, he’s a kidnap victim from a parallel dimension.
Thomas Riker supposedly proved that the transporter can be used to duplicate sentient living beings. So why aren’t there mass-produced transporter duplicates? There are plenty of unscrupulous powers that would love to exploit this existential loophole and create huge armies of Jem Hadar or some such. They would have no ethical limitations on making such things, and broadly speaking if a scientific / engineering problem CAN be solved then it WILL be solved, and doubly more so when someone proves that it definitely CAN be solved.
Because the theory of his creation is wrong. He wasn’t duplicated by the interference field, his transport beam was filtered through a parallel dimension and back, and captured Thomas from his home dimension and dropped him in ours. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, we know that transporter fuckery can cause trans-dimensional transporting. When they discovered Thomas, they got the interpretation of the phenomenon wrong, and set everyone on a drastically wrong path of research. His duplication hasn’t been duplicated, because he was never duplicated to begin with.