Teleporter
Page 25
Try the next in the series, to be published someday soon.
Author’s Afterword
This is a comment on the “science” in this science fiction novel. I have always been partial to science fiction that posed a “what if” question. Not everything in the story has to be scientifically plausible, but you suspend your disbelief regarding one or two things that aren’t thought to be possible. Essentially you ask, “what if” something (such as faster than light travel) were possible, how might that change our world?
So, in this story the central question is, “What if someone really could teleport something with their mind? Certainly, teleportation is a staple of science fiction. Many of the stories posit someone who can move themselves or other large objects from one location to another. This story asks, “What if only small objects could be teleported? And they couldn’t even be teleported very far?
The answer to that question is, to my way of thinking, “Wow!” You could do a lot of amazing things, especially some amazing medical procedures. Like anything, there is potential to not only help others, but to do harm as well.
One thing that giving much thought to this question makes evident is that, unfortunately, no magician can actually move a pea from one inverted cup to another with their mind. If they really could do that, surely they could find more amazing, wonderful and remunerative things to do with their power than showing off for audiences.
Some readers have been interested in the “rules” I’m trying to follow in these stories. As implied in the story, the capability of Daussie’s teleportation drops off (linearly) with distance, both the distance she is from the teleported object and the distance she is teleporting the object. Below are some examples to give an idea of what she can do at which distances.
If she’s 1 foot away she can move a 3.4 gram object (a nickel weighs 5 grams) one foot after she focuses for one second. If she’s four feet away it would take four seconds
Thus at a distance of one foot she can move-
0.034g 100ft in 1 sec
0.34g 10 ft. in 1 sec
3.4g 1 foot in 1 sec - 2ft in 2 sec -4ft in 4 sec
34g 1 foot in 10 sec
340 g 1 ft. in 100 sec
3.4 kg 1 ft. in 16.6 mins
34 kg 1 ft. in 2.8 hrs.
During this story, she’s still learning to do teleportation, so is only about 1/10th to 1/5th as effective as the list above would indicate.
Tarc and Daussie’s sensory abilities diminish with distance and are better for warm objects than for cool ones. Thus Tarc can feel human temperature objects out to about 200 meters and Daussie out to 225 meters. They can sense room temperature objects weakly at 135 meters (the “image” they get is much higher quality when they are close) and fires at 400 meters. The sun is really hot so they always know where it is, even though it’s incredibly far away.
For fun I’d like to point out that Daussie could have undone the bonds on her wrists by using her talent to remove little pieces of rope until she could break it. But this is just the kind of thing a person won’t think of in the heat of the moment (most people, when their brakes fail, don’t think to put on their emergency brake, down shift, or turn off the engine). Some of you were probably gnashing your teeth because you did think of it though.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the editing and advice of Gail Gilman, Nora Dahners, Elene Trull, Mike Alsobrook, Hamilton Elliott, Kat Lind, Jan Mattei, and Abiola Streete, each of whom significantly improved this story.