If only I could teleport.
I could travel without luggage. Simply teleport to where I wanted to go. Bring nothing but a wallet and a passport. Visit the world without decking myself out like a tank.
I could teleport back home if I needed to. When I needed to. As a picky and spoiled brat, not many accommodations pleased me. Rooms had to be spot clean. Bathroom included. Carpet. No shoes inside. Otherwise, I would treat the space as public. Which they kind of were. And I would not be able to relax.
In this case, I could travel to cities by day, or by night, and teleport back home to its fresh air; semi-secluded, quiet location; nice bathroom and shower without floors and toilets dirtied by careless residents; soft, fluffy but firm bed with three pillows; desktop workstation with three monitors and can compute like a beast; access to my essential-and-hard-to-carry equipment such as extra monitors, a pen display; access to pretty much all the little but essential-when-you-need-them utilities, such as scissors, nail clipper, wireless mouse and keyboard, pretty much any kind of charging or display cord; all the clothes I’d ever need, including private laundry machines. Must I list more? I did say I was spoiled.
If only I could teleport.
I wouldn’t have to travel by plane. Deal with their hassles. Their security screenings. Checking in hours before a flight. Their long lines for customs and border protection, even though I have a flight in one hour. Especially in the United States. And the usually irritable people managing those long, impatient lines. I don’t blame them. We’re pretty irritable. And clueless.
I wouldn’t have to deal with airlines if I missed a flight. Find out I have to book a different flight that leaves two days later. Or be sent between two airline check-in counters because their systems weren’t synchronized yet, even though they book international flights with each other. Then have to travel back to the hostel I’d basically booked out of already.
I wouldn’t have to worry about how I would relocate when I find a job. If I find a job. Because my industry is biased to the far west of North America. Or the far east. I wouldn’t have to worry about transporting my beefy computer and its three monitors. All the equipment I have, as I’m sure security would be all over them. And all the paperwork and collections I have.
Essentially, if only I had a fourth-dimensional door to my room.
That is the essence of what I am daydreaming about. Forget having a plot of land I’d have to manage and pay mortgage for. I could have a secluded, quiet room in the higher dimension. Take it anywhere I’d like, without needing to adapt to a new space when I relocate. I could travel the world by day and return to my room without needing to obliterate my atomic structure and recreate it somewhere else. Additionally, being fourth-dimensional, the door could fold up to the size of a laptop, and unfold to the size of a 7x3ft doorway. Or however large I wanted it to be. No worries about fitting large furniture through the door.
But then I guess I’d still have to travel to different locations then. Which includes airlines and road traffic. And I’d need to find a good place to hide my fourth-dimensional door while I stayed in my room. And it would be hard to get internet access without having an outer-world location where the cable could route to. Which means paying a mortgage for that land. So I guess I’d rather teleport. Obliterate my atomic structure anyway.
This, of course, assumes I’m the only one that could teleport.
If everyone could teleport to their own discretion, then… Well, I’m pretty sure you can figure out how that’d turn out. The world would have the same freakout as we did after nine-eleven. Easy terrorist plots. Teleport armies into the capital. Break into important server rooms. Drop nuclear bombs on all enemies, at the same instant. Teleport a portion of the sun to Earth. Which can be the same as dropping a nuclear bomb I suppose.
Or if you’re into the little things, one could rob a bank. Go shopping, but teleport away in a blind corner before checking out. Spy on your ex, then teleport away once you’ve been noticed. Kidnap someone and get away instantly. Steal an important artifact. Illegally immigrate. Obtain some drugs that are considered illegal in one place but not in another. Swipe an Amazon package before it arrived at its final destination. Steal this. Steal that.
Teleportation would be revolutionary. But maybe not for the reasons one may think of.
Think about it. Teleportation is essentially a deconstructional and reconstructional process. Reading atomic structures, obliterating them, then sending the data somewhere else to reconstruct them. Getting past its complex difficulties, it will be super convenient for shipping commercial products across the country and internationally.
But what’s stopping people from skipping the first two steps?
Why not analyze and obliterate a product, then recreate it on the other side of your desk? And then make another recreation. And then another. And another. And another. Not even needing to obliterate another quantity of the product to make another. You have the blueprints already. And there’s plenty of atoms around you already. No need to follow the honor system and obliterate a copy of the product before you recreate it somewhere else.
The obvious downside is commercial. Once a company comes out with a product, they’d sell a few quantities the first week or two, then see their profits suddenly drop. Why? Because there’s no need to buy it anymore. People have the blueprints to make their own.
Other businesses may see their profits drop right away anyway, regardless of new releases. Three-dimensional modeling will certainly be a common skill at this point, and many households may as well model their own custom furniture, suited to their own custom needs. Standard parts, such as screw, tools, and cables will only be profitable during their standardization stage.
And then, of course, wars could carry on endlessly. Assuming humanity is rational enough to avoid the mad option of nuking everything and sticking to gun fights, nations could produce endless supplies of ammunition and weaponry. Not even at the factories, but on site of conflicts. Heck, just materialize the rounds in the magazine, saving the gunner, or drone, the hassle of reloading.
That being said, there would be some benefits. It’d be a miracle solution to landfills. Plastic pollution. Air pollution. Light pollution, once we’ve run out of pollutions to solve. Got a wildfire? Teleport some fire retardants onto it. And the smoke it caused? Deconstruct it into something harmless. Got a hurricane? Gobble it up, and disperse its atoms elsewhere. Too much rain, causing landslides? Same thing. Earthquakes? Tough luck. At least it’s easy to rebuild your house. Or yourself.
And I haven’t even addressed the fact that humanity would essentially have an endless supply of food. Never go hungry. Eat whatever you’d like. If electricity is the only requirement, aside from atoms, then it’d become one of the most essential resources of the new age. More than it is already, which seems like an unimaginable notion.
And there are many other consequences such as the risks during early stages of teleportation development, issues of human cloning, debate of what makes a person a person, etc. But I really should wrap up this discussion.
So. If only I could teleport.
What do we lose out of it? Assuming people only use it for leisure travel, one would be the novelty of exploring, as one could travel anywhere on a whim. Saying you’ve traveled to a far corner of the world, or a well-known city wouldn’t be all that impressive, as your companion could do the same after they’ve finished their conversation with you. Another would be the magnitude of overcrowding in popular cities. Then the lack of commercial from hotels. Although I suppose those spaces could be reconstructed to permanent homes. Expensive ones.
Assuming people do use it liberally, then there is the loss of one’s peace-of-mind. A bomb could drop on your location any moment. Or if they wanted to be discrete, just deatomize your body on the spot. You may have a backup copy of your body somewhere else, but data wars will certainly ensue the world. Never a better time to use an EMP bomb. And what’s stopping the possibility of having multiple copies of yourself roaming the streets at a time? These won’t be ‘shadow clones’ that could poof away and instantly send their uniquely acquired memories back to your ‘original’ body. They will be considered a unique individual. And who’s to say which ‘original’ should be kept if there should only be one?
So there’s that, nebulous mess.
And. If only I could teleport.
No one else. Well, depending on how covert I am, the world may never know. Only I would have the convenience of traveling the world. I would not be able to sympathize with the struggles of getting funding to travel, or saving the money to relocate, and the debate of whether my relocation would be good for raising my children.
If I wanted, I could get away with stealing, as stores would not be fully equipped for teleport-heists yet. I could import whatever I wanted, such as eastern cuisine or electronic products, which are generally cheaper in east Asia. Or I could forget that whole process and swipe the product off the shelves from whichever store I wanted.
If I decided to show off, I could become the world’s ambassador; the one who’s traveled to all the continents and taken the time to understand their lives. Or the most spoiled person in the world. Outcast from society as corrupt and unrelatable, because I do not use my unique ability to solve problems more efficiently than other. Because I’m sure there’ll be some unreasonable expectations put upon me.
I could literally claim that I’ve died more than twice. And be the only immortal.