Free Teleport This by Christopher M. Daniels Page A

right to their teleport where they’d hold her for a sizeable ransom. You can’t trust a crook, unless of course their own skin is in the game, which is why she alerted the guard. “Okay, show me the teleport.”
    “Oh, Jon, don’t be mad at me. Remember, I’m in love and people in love commit desperate actions.”
    “As to that, did I mention that I didn’t believe one word of your story?”
    “Not one word?”
    “Well, maybe the part about shopping.”
    “And I worked so hard on it.”
    “Will you please tell me what’s going on?”
    “Later. We need to leave now, the guards are getting edgy and they’re planning to storm the building.”
    “Did you even call the guard?”
    “I sure did, no turning back now. Here, look at the news broadcast.” Jon looked at the screen Alicia was pointing at and, sure enough, there was his picture in the corner and the royal apartment surrounded by guards, all ready to rush in and collect the reward. Looks like he got juicy again.
    “Let’s go,” he said.
    “Oh, don’t be grumpy just because I outsmarted you.” Alicia smiled, “So tell me, love, what’s the plan, where are we going?”
    “BB89.”
    “Is that supposed to be funny?”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    11.
     
    If asked, Gilbert would grudgingly admit that the past few days spent on Ellie’s ship were the happiest days of his life, at least so far. The ship was immense, though Ellie assured him that it was typical for a cargo ship. Gilbert had wondered about the need for spaceships, what with teleport technology and all.
    “Teleportation is very limited when it comes to very dense materials, such as metals.” Gilbert was told when he asked Franco, the ship’s engineer. “The human body doesn’t contain a lot of dense material; just the bones and they’re not that dense when compared to most metals so people go through easy enough.”
    It also turns out that teleportation is a fairly expensive thing to do. Simon and Gilbert have been bopping about on the ICC’s nickel and haven’t had to pay, but to most folks teleportation can be a bit pricey. Even when Gilbert and Simon left Earth, their homemade teleport signal only sent them to the orbiting probes which then relayed them on through via the ICC’s private network.
    Gilbert was spending most of his time on Ellie’s ship studying the physics behind teleportation and faster than light travel.
    “Look,” said Franco, “everything you know is correct. You just don’t know everything yet. You guys haven’t gotten to the point where you’ve taken a black hole apart or figured out how to generate dark matter in your basement. Let me set you up with access to the ship’s computer and you can read up on it.”
    Once online, Gilbert didn’t leave his room for seven hours. When he did leave, he had that ‘I can’t believe what I just saw’ expression on his face. He stumbled past Ellie who noticed his bewildered expression and just assumed that he had found the hyper-porn channel.
    Here’s some interesting stuff Gilbert learned about the universe. First, as far as anyone can determine, it’s finite but growing infinitely larger by the second. The crazy thing just keeps on expanding, though it gets pretty funky at the leading edge. All types of phenomenon happening out there that nobody wants to get up close and personal with. Some probes were sent out, but time and space got so screwy that they never reached the end. They did send back enough data for scientist to discover that the universe just creates more of itself as it expands in all directions with nothing slowing it down. The best description they can give breaks it down to normal space, then a kind of mixed buffer zone, followed immediately by wacky town – kind of like driving into Vegas. Here’s something Gilbert learned about human nature: even with this understanding of the universe and the verified existence of the human soul, most people still care more about what goes on