“In fact,” Nicole said, “I’m not sure I’m up for conspiracy to commit murder. If Ryan’s not back here soon, I’m going to call the feds, and you can tell them it was the aliens that did it.”
The download completed. Alex flicked through the new icons that had appeared on her display. As familiar as she was with this interface, it was easy to identify the right one. The same glowing arrow with adjustable length and direction appeared in her vision, only this time it was annotated with a few numeric parameters and a drop-down list of locations. Alex chose “parking lot” and saw the numeric parameters change.
“Don’t worry,” Alex said. “I’m not going to wait around that long.” She didn’t have time to experiment. She flicked her eyes, and the lab disappeared.
Without any transition, she was back in the parking lot. She stumbled and fell headlong into Oronzi’s car, disoriented and feeling sick. This would take some getting used to, but oh, was it glorious. She didn’t know whether Nicole would sound an alarm or not, but she didn’t want to wait around to find out. Examining her reflection in the window, she initiated the invisibility module, and was gratified to see her reflection disappear.
She knew she had to get away from the NJSC grounds as quickly as possible, but she didn’t want to risk another teleport before she knew what she was doing. The possibility of ending up underground, or inside a wall, or thirty feet above pavement, was just too great.
She sat down on the hood of Oronzi’s car, trusting that no one would be able to see her, and brought up the teleportation interface. There were a few preset locations, but the arrow could be oriented in any direction, and the numbers set arbitrarily. With a little experimentation, Alex realized that the numbers were in ECEF coordinates, making the arrow a vector from the center of the Earth to a precise point. Not only that, but the program had been hooked up to a map locator with terrain and altitude data, allowing her to determine what vector would actually put her on the Earth’s surface, instead of over or under it.
Was it really possible? The interface implied that she could teleport from here to Beijing, if she got the coordinates right. More than that, if she set the magnitude of the vector high enough, she could teleport to anywhere. Of course, the fact that the interface could support a teleport to Jupiter didn’t mean that the underlying technology could actually do it, any more than a speedometer with numbers up to 200 mph meant the car could actually drive that fast.
Oronzi’s warning about believing technologies you hadn’t designed yourself came starkly to mind. Where did the map and terrain data the program was using come from? How accurate was it? It included the locations of buildings as well, but was it up-to-date with new construction? And what about moving obstacles like cars? Not to mention that this was beta software, probably written by physicists, not professional software engineers.
In the end, however, she couldn’t not use it. It was too powerful, too amazing a technology to resist. She chose Marsh Creek Lake, a place she had been many times as a child, in an area that she knew was likely to be isolated. She figured teleporting over water gave the best chance of the elevation data being reasonably accurate, and gave her the best protection in case it wasn’t. She chose a point twenty feet from the shore and two feet over the surface of the water, then yelped when it was more like five feet over the water. She splashed under and came up spluttering and treading water.
She was glad that she’d tried it over water first; that fall would have been rough over land. The disadvantage, of course, was that now she was wet. She swam to shore and sloshed through the mud to dry ground. She didn’t care. She had just traveled from Lakehurst, New Jersey, to Lyndell, Pennsylvania, instantaneously. She wanted to go back and do it again. It was incredible, world-changing technology. Elated by her success, she tried again, this time to Blue Marsh Lake, a larger body of water in Berks County that she had visited once, years ago. The elevation data was better this time, and she slipped into the water with a little more grace.
She wondered what happened to the air when she did this. Could it be displaced that fast? Trying to move air molecules the width of her body instantaneously was impossible; even if they moved at the speed of light, the force of it would start a fusion reaction and annihilate her. Perhaps the air was traded, ending up back in the position she had left behind. Or perhaps she didn’t really appear instantaneously, as it seemed to her, but a little at a time, slowly enough that the air could move out of the way. If so, what would happen if she appeared in the water? Could the water molecules move away fast enough, or would the friction tear her apart?
The technology was incredible, but the obvious risks she was taking started to sober her. Not only that, but she knew that this was no purely human-invented technology. Fifteen years earlier, such a technology had been the means by which the varcolac entered the world. For all she knew, she was calling the creature to her by this unrestrained experimentation.
The sky was darkening. She needed to find a place to stay, and teleportation couldn’t conjure her a bed or a fake ID. Her older sister Claire lived in California. The thought of going to Claire for help filled Alex with a sudden hope. Claire always knew what to do. She was never rattled, never without a plan, never with a lock of beautiful blond hair out of place. It was sometimes infuriating, but if Alex was in trouble, Claire was the one who could help. She wouldn’t judge or ask embarrassing questions; she would just take care of everything. Besides, the police wouldn’t be looking for her so far away, at least not yet.
But she couldn’t go to Claire. She didn’t know California, for one thing, so she would be teleporting to an unfamiliar place. Besides, she didn’t know how far away teleportation would work, or what would happen to her if she went too far. She had been lucky so far, but she was starting to think she shouldn’t push her luck stretching the limits of this technology.
There was only one place nearby where she thought she would be safe. She risked one more teleport, this time into the Schuylkill River where it twisted its way through Philadelphia. She was tiring of these blind dunks under water, but it was better than risking materializing eight feet above a parking lot. She clambered out at Grays Ferry Road, still a good ten city blocks from her destination.
It was a long walk in wet shoes. She almost took the risk and teleported there instead. What she needed was someone standing at her destination who could confirm the coordinates and guarantee her a clear zone. For this to become a usable technology, there would have to be teleportation stations established around the world, measured and adjusted to maintain a constant vector, with coordinated transition times between stations. In fact, all that could be automated, so that a traveler in Philadelphia could enter a booth, choose a location—and pay the fee—and then reappear in a similar booth in Australia. Cross-Atlantic travel could be as easy as riding an elevator.
But she was getting ahead of herself. This technology came with strings attached, and those strings could get her, and anyone involved with it, killed. She’d been stupid. Stupid to have believed that the wonderful technologies she had been working with had come merely through the brilliance of a man. She had known, at some level, that this was the same basic technology her father’s colleague had “invented” fifteen years before, and that, just like then, it involved a deal with the devil.