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You have one fast travel point, where do you place it?
The rules are you have a magic remote, and you are immediately transported to a location of your choice. You can use it as many times you want, but it will only go to the one location. Where do you put it?
I think this is largely just a little too useless for me - if it was two way, as in I could go somewhere and come back I might have a good answer, but there's just not anywhere I'd teleport one way to.
If I absolutely had to pick, it would be my home, but I wouldn't bank on that being my home permanently so I'd hate to waste it like that if I can't adjust it to at least be my current home at any time. The positive is, I could buy one way flights to anywhere and then just warp home instead of having to travel back - that saves a ton of time and money.
If I could do two way teleports, there and back (but only to the place I teleported from, wherever that is) then home would be pretty sweet, since I could just get an Uber to work one day, then go back and forth automatically. Pop on home for lunch break, have a nice meal, pop back in to work - skip commute to and fro, that would be sweet.
Yea also unless you can take others and things with you using it for travel is kind of useless. I'm sure my wife wouldn't be my wife for long if I just skipped home while she's stuck bringing back the luggage and kid.
A few miles above the ground. That way I could just take a parachute or glider with me and I can get anywhere!
Actually just thinking about it is making me sick, so probably not that.
If you can teleport with something that could be an interesting idea for free energy. No reason your clothes can't weigh a megaton! Maybe delivering payloads for Starlink or the ISS?
I used to think about a system of transport through lubed/vacuum tubes of a planet with a solid core, letting you get to the other side with nearly no additional energy.
[dark] hundreds of years later, humans are still using this artifact that @Akir left behind as a source of free energy. Monuments are built in their honour, and many cities are founded in their name .....but no one knows how they kept their biometrics fresh to push the button after all this time.....
You get stuck in quicksand. You press the teleporter button. The teleporter doesn't know where the clothes end and the world begins. The entire world teleports. You die. Then a while later the earth, having changed it's trajectory, falls into the sun.
I don't think I like this teleporter solution anymore.
I too am old enough to remember thinking that quicksand would be a much larger problem in my adult life.
It's strangely disappointing when you learn that you can just float in it, isn't it?
Fuck yeah it was.
Not only is it not an actual problem in any facet of my life, it won't just straight up kill me if I do happen across it‽ What a ripoff!
I require danger at every step!
Stop, you're making me want to reread Jumper, 1993 again! Kid learns he can teleport and eventually tries experimenting with various objects, including hand-cuffing himself to things just to see what happens.
Ah, the Breath of the Wild approach. Smart thinking.
Imagine having the constant threat that if you use your fast travel point you would fall and die.
You're going to forget and accidentally Sheogorath yourself one day. :c
A few miles above the ocean and then I spend my time making people who talk on speakerphone in public push the button.
My bedroom. It is the place I travel to most commonly and all my airfare becomes one way.
Just have to hope it's your forever home.
Meh as long as it's the same city it could still be convenient. Just not for the new people in that house.
Lol imagine that clause in the purchase agreement: to allow access out of their home in perpetuity.
Depends on how much you are allowed to bring back. If it's anything you can carry, then hell yeah. If it's only you plus immediate clothes, then you'd have to get cheap clothing every time you travel.
Still sounds like a pretty great tradeoff IMO. Can always pack minimally and ship a few things back to myself, if it comes to that.
It would need to be inside a building on property I own, somewhere pretty obscure where nobody would notice when I arrive or leave, but still accessible by public transportation so I wouldn’t need to take a taxi to get out again.
Assuming you can bring things with you when you teleport, you might be able to make a pretty good living as a thief or smuggler. Exploring caves might be fun? Rescue work might be interesting if you can bring people with you, though that would mean revealing your secret.
The Merchant Princes is a fun series by Charles Stross about people who have a restricted ability to teleport, only carrying whatever they hold themselves.
Ohhhhh I live sideways teleport stories!! Quick question, is the Merchant Princess series suitable for younger teens? Like, some-ish violence and human sexuality okay, but just not full on 5 pages descriptions of human sacrifice or graphic going-ons of stuff etc. :)
To your response, yes I feel like it's important that no one knows I'm coming and going too
Uh, how do you feel about women trapped in medieval cultures, arranged marriages, and nuclear weapons? It's not explicit or gory, though.
Not explicitly gory is great - discussion topics then :) amazing ~~~ I'll still read the first one first tho
The airport of some big European hub like Heathrow (past security). It would let you easily get pretty much anywhere on that side of the globe within hours.
The story ends when security notices something weird on their cameras and they arrest you the next time you teleport in. You can do it again, but they know where to find you. Eventually they build your prison cell in the middle of Heathrow airport and everyone has to walk around it.
I was about to make a comment like this, suggesting a major hub airport. But after reading yours, I thought a bit more. And there is one problem with it; how do you get home? Yes, teleporting to the hub airport would allow you to quickly fly to anywhere and back to that hub airport. But then you're stuck at that hub with no easy way back.
I was going to be all private and secretive and selfish about it, but @teaearlgraycold got me thinking more altruistically instead.
Since the experiment is repeatable, and predictable, it must mean it follows some sort of scientific rule.
I set the point to land I own, maybe some nice land locked piece of huge forest surrounded by protected national park land and virgin old growth forest :D
Then I open this device up to the scientific community. Not to my country: to the international scientific community.
Humanity receives:
permission to build a small research station on said land
my cooperation to gather data to reverse engineer the button
I recieve:
cool helicopter rides back to my house after spending the day foraging for mushrooms and other fun forest activities
personal use of the tech when they have the thing figured out and can mass produce teleportation.
When OP made the question, the one way nature of it was the obvious down side. If I can get a nice ride out of the deal AND there's a chance we could ALL teleport freely, oh boy!!! Even if they end up murdering me to bury the secret....I tried, and I guess it would be worth it. Tech this useful can never really truly be hidden for long ..... in a hundred years the wars will blow over and we can probably use this as an energy thing to save our species. At least it could put Amazon delivery out of business [laughs]
Assuming I can go somewhere I've never been before (and can take some stuff with me), I would like to place my spot somewhere lightyears away. Then, once I'm ready to die, I could teleport over there with a probe of some sort and put it in orbit around a distant star - ready to beam back info to humans on Earth.
The hard part would be convincing NASA that I'm not crazy. That actually might be impossible :(
That's a good one, just takes some convincing and there isn't really a lot to lose on NASA's part. Either you're on the verge of death, hand on a deep space probe that they already plan to launch, you push your teleport button and both you and the probe disappear proving that you weren't lying or nothing happens and they strap it to a rocket like they always expected to do.
I'm not saying it's easy to convince them of such, but it is low risk.
Nah man, a probe like that would only cost a cool few million at most plus an intern who'll listen for minimum of a week after you leave. If it's fake then oh well. If it's real though the data would be one of the most valuable endeavours we've ever tried!! I'm nearly positive you could find at least one private investor willing to throw chump change at the off chance for the incalculably valuable data.
So it'll depend on how you got the darn thing and if the story is believable. Hand of God + booming voice + millions witness His handing it over to you would be fairly credible, I think. That you found it from pawn shop hunting .....less believable :)
I feel that as long as you can transmit the data back and have someone who believes you and can listen to that data stream, it shouldn't be too hard to convince NASA when it comes in. After all, how else will they explain the transmission?
Could it be my bedroom regardless of wherever my bedroom happens to be at the time? So if I do move, and that place becomes my bedroom, the quick travel goes there.
It's basically the most convenient option. You'll always have to go back home at some point. From anywhere. It's like having a quick travel to your safe house.
You could go home from work, you would only ever need one way tickets to anywhere. If you were at a party and decided you needed to leave asap, you'd just have to think of home.
The Black Sand Beach on the big island of Hawaii.
That's where I lost the toenail on my big toe!
Well tell us the story then! Did it ever grow back?
I'm waiting to hear this one too! Was it a sea turtle? An unfortunate encounter with a coconut? Or did the toenail wish to dramatically part ways and stay in Hawaii?
Yeah, it grew back.
I went out there for a week to visit my old college roommate who had gotten a job there. We were crossing a little stream that went out to the ocean, and my foot slipped on a rock as I put my weight on it; as my foot slid, my toenail caught on the rock and ripped it 99% of the way off. It was just hanging on by a little sliver, so I just ripped it the rest of the way off and let it go into the ocean.
My friend just got her car while I was there, so it didn't even have a first aid kit, either. We were only at the black sand beach for maybe 5 minutes before it happened, so we left to go get first aid supplies.
On the ride back to Kona, I recalled reading something about that river in the guide book I bought ("Hawaii The Big Isle Revealed") so skimmed the book to find what it was: it was a travel advisory about leptospirosis, which uses that specific river as an example of a place where it was easily contracted.
I only had a day or two left before going home, so I just went and got antibiotics when I got back to the mainland.
Bacterial infection that, without treatment, "can lead to kidney damage, meningitis(inflammation of the membrane around the brain and spinal cord), liver failure, respiratory distress, and even death." (CDC)
Good call on the antibiotics.
Did it super hurt? Did it hurt more when it happened, or when you ripped the rest off, or afterwards?
I guess you left a little piece of you behind......
@GalileoPotato, they answered in the parent.
It was definitely unpleasant, but it happened really quickly, so it wasn't that horrible. Ripping the rest off didn't really hurt at all; it was just hanging on by a little strand of nail. The worst pain was hitting my toe right where the nail would have been for about two weeks after it happened. The worst was on the flight home, I caught it on the seat in front of me while half asleep and I almost cried.
Wow! That's where I found my Lucky Toenail!
Probably inside my house.
No more annoying commute back home from work.
If I am bored at an event, bar or even a club I can just teleport back home 🥹
Easy - my bathroom! I have this inability to use the bathroom anywhere outside of my own house, so if nature calls, I'm home AND can easily use the bathroom.
A hospital seems like a good fast travel point, though that really only helps you out in a medical emergency and hopefully it's not something you really even need to use that often (but it could be a life or death moment if you ever do need it).
My birthplace might be nice and make a bit more sense, but then traveling one-way from there on a regular basis would get expensive, and other than being born there, I have no other connection to it.
Home seems like the completely obvious answer, though if you ever move it kind of gives you a useless fast travel point if you can't change the location, but while I live there, I would be using that on a daily basis, especially if I could travel with objects. Ride a bike around everywhere, go to the store, load up the bike, then BAMPF! back home with everything. Going out drinking? BAMPF! no driving home drunk. Want to just travel to some random part of the globe for shits & giggles? BAMPF! home in a jiffy and you only ever need to get one-way tickets (though the authorities may become suspicious).
A Rick & Morty-esque save point remote would be even more useful if you could fast travel in both time & space (provided you weren't just dimension-hopping the whole time instead). Everyday could be Groundhog day and you could just keep on replaying each day til you "got it right", you could probably become a pretty successful day trader that way (assuming also you can change the fast travel point).
I like these side points of yours like the anchor-or-space and vacuum. You'd fare far better than I when it comes to mean DMs or genies. :)
Additional: is your momentum at the moment of button press preserved?
If you could only go somewhere you've already been AND couldn't bring things, I think the only practical use would be to go home. Which is kinda boring.
How would you make use of / exploit the vacuum property?
I can't think of somewhere I'd want to lock in permanently as things change and it would suck having a teleporter to an old house that is no longer your home or an airport terminal that was decommissioned and turned into part of the runway.
A little morbid but maybe like the surface of the sun in case I needed a quick and painless death.
Oooh dark. Or in this case, super bright.
Really depends. If I can return from the fast travel point to the location I was when I pressed the remote by pressing the remote again, the answer would be wildly different then when I can just press the remote to travel there but have to return on my own.
Scenario A would definitely be somewhere in Norway. I traveled through half of Norway back in 2021 and there are so many places I'd like to revisit time and time again.
Scenario B would probably be something like work, so can at least get rid of one daily commute and just have to deal with the commute back home lol
Then you get fired.
The largest train station in the major metro area that I live near. I could go a lot more frequently and comfortably with half the commute.
Easy - home. That's the place where I like to be and where I return most often.
I'd buy a place near Chicago and set my point there. It's a main airport hub so easy to get around the country, similar to the big European hub idea. I like the city. And as long as I keep the place, my teleport point will be private. I'd get some kind of space that I could rent out part of it and keep my point off limits.