A theoretical transporter with almost unlimited range, pursued by transporter inventor Emory Erickson, whose tests of the fundamentally flawed concept cost him his son Quinn.
Sub-quantum teleportation was supposed to make starships unnecessary by beaming people across interstellar distances. Its champion was Emory Erickson, the inventor of the transporter, and the idea is central to the Enterprise episode Daedalus.
Erickson comes aboard Enterprise with his daughter Danica, saying he wants to test the system in a region of space called the Barrens. In truth the theory never worked. An experiment fifteen years earlier left his son Quinn trapped in a degrading transporter signal, and Erickson has come to pull him out.
After an apparition kills a crewman, Archer forces the truth from his old family friend. Quinn is finally rematerialised but is too badly damaged to survive, and Erickson accepts the consequences of his deception.