Let’s suppose you wake up one day and have the ability to self-teleport yourself. Your ability has the following extents and limitations:
You can teleport your physical body, clothing, and as much stuff as a person can normally carry (e.g. a backpack or a suitcase or some such thing.) You cannot teleport anyone else or anything larger than stuff you can carry.
The teleporting is instantaneous, perfect, and completely without physical risk.
It takes no more energy to teleport than it takes to think hard about something.
You can only teleport to a location with which you are familiar. Any place you have ever been and can remember (not photographically, but reasonably well) can be teleported to. You can also teleport to any place you know of and see in a picture - you could, for instance, teleport to the Oval Office, which you’ve all seen in pictures, or my living room if I sent you a picture of it, or the front of the Taj Mahal by simply looking at a postcard. A reasonably good verbal description and a map or blueprint would be good enough, too, but it must be someone you can visualize and know something specific about. You can’t just whisk yourself away to Fort Knox’s vault if you’ve no idea what it looks like or even where it is beyond the vague idea of “Fort Knox.”
4a. Somehow your teleportation ability prevents teleporting into a space occupied by existing mass. If your best friend just put a pool table in his living room you will not accidentally become part of his pool table, you will materialize in the nearest available space. Air and liquids are pushed out of the way when you materialize.
There is no distance limitation. You could teleport yourself to the Sea of Tranquility if you so desired.
Your ability to teleport yourself is shared by no other human being on earth **and will be every bit as amazing to anyone who witnesses it as you would expect. ** You have to deal with the consequences of people finding out about it, if they do, but…
Beginning the day you get this ability, nobody knows about it unless you tell them (and they believe you) or someone catches you doing it and figures out what’s going on. There is otherwise no scientific explanation for what you can do and no prior reason for anyone to believe it doable. Teleportation leaves behind no signature or trace.
Alright, now you can teleport. What do you do? Is there money to be made here?
I win the James Randi prize for a million dollars to tide me over. Then as a publicly acknowledged teleporter I offer my services (for a reasonable fee; I’m not greedy but I need to eat) to NASA and/or other space exploration organizations. A spacesuit and backpack is enough to let me carry all sorts of scientific packages all over the Solar System, given how much of it NASA has photographed. With some training I could presumably build larger devices, bringing the parts piece by piece.
How often can this ability be used? Can I teleport again within seconds, or is there a refractory period?
Anyway, my idea: Be a courier to bring goods from ground level to low Earth orbit (e.g. to the International Space Station). Getting stuff into orbit has a very very high cost and carbon footprint, so you could drastically undercut current launch prices and still make big piles of money. Plus it’s very specialized work so you have few people to persuade to be discreet about your powers.
I’d offer to build a breathable workspace on the moon for SpaceX (or whoever). Not an entire complex, just a big enough space to get the ball rolling so they could build a station there and have at least the initial start up cost be ridiculously cheap for them. Or heck, just offer to deliver cargo there 150 - 200lbs at a time.
In return they can build me a habitat with breathable oxygen and lots of bay windows to enjoy the magnificent view.
I’d get a rubber Max Headroom mask and when someone from the GOP is on live TV giving comments to the press at the Capitol, I’d teleport behind him and WEDGIE! Then I’d vanish. I’d do this so often that live TV would become a thing of the past.
More like the books, which doesn’t have the “hunted by ancient order of assassins” thing. And the second book, Reflex, is a solid cautionary tale for keeping the ability secret.
Personally, I’d enjoy the ability rather than try to capitalize it, other than to move somewhere the cost of living is cheap while keeping a job where salaries are high.
First thing, my daily commute just got a LOT shorter and cheaper! And I could go home for lunch every day. It would also get a hell of a lot easier to visit friends and family.
I like the idea of offering exclusive courier services, and the space travel notion, but I think I’d just get some solid practice in before approaching anyone.
I would begin the life of crime of which I have always dreamed knowing I could always teleport from the inevitable jail cell.
But seriously, travel w/o baggage or the freak’n airport crap.
Also bringing supplies to people trapped in a mine. If the mine owners could show me a picture of inside the mine and I can carry tanks of oxygen and food and bandages. But then everyone would know and the scientists will want to dissect me.:eek:
The quickness by which you can teleport again is the essential value that has yet to be determined. If the cycle time is low (< 1 second), you could do a lot more than if it were 5 minutes or something like that. I can see getting into a bad situation and not being able to teleport away quickly enough.
Although teleporting to a museum and borrowing a painting for a bit appeals to me. But I would put it back eventually.
I vaguely recall a scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. One of them goes to a bank with the female character requesting a tour of the vault so the “little lady” will feel secure about her deposit. I can not think of any other way to see inside a place with lots of money. I could go to a jewelry store but I do not really like diamonds; nor do I want to associate with the type of person who will buy the hot rocks.:eek:
