Super powers

[rowyn]

A long, long time ago, on a site far, far away, a diarist called Imago posed the question: "If you could have a super power, what would it be?"

Curiously, this wasn't at all a hard choice for me. I just never got around to setting it down.

Teleportation.

Now, not the short-hop style of teleport, to go through walls and such--no, I want long-distance teleportation. Want to go somewhere? Poof, you're there. Wouldn't that make going to see friends a snap?

Of course, such an ability would also carry lucrative opportunities, both to earn money and to do good. If I could carry just a couple of kilograms with me when I 'ported, think of the benefits in, say, organ transportation for hospitals. Great talent for a courier job. Not to mention spy missions.

There's the usual host of criminal applications, but I can't imagine that I'd use any (except under special cases, see below). There'd be plenty of legitimate ways to make a good living. The closest I might come to "crime" would be the above-mentioned spying. Though I'm not sure I'd want to let the US gov't know about my power. On the one hand, I could help them lots. On the other, I don't trust them.

On the bright side, it's really hard to threaten someone who has global teleportation powers. "If you don't do this, we'll shoo--oh, frak, where'd she go this time?" On the down side, I wouldn't necessarily be able to protect my friends and relatives from being taken hostage. I don't know that I'd want to be in a position to get blackmailed, or be a target.

Really, though, I don't care about being a super-hero or a super-spy. I just want teleportation so I can go visit all my friends. I'd be happiest if we could get Niven's teleport booths running on street corners world-wide. That'd do me just fine.

Comments

Super-powers are a lot mroe visible than human abilities

[(Anonymous)]

Most people have relatively ordinary abilities which are not likely to bring throngs of people insisting that "you are the only one who can help me...." Being able to do something twice as well as the average person or even 100 times as well is relatively invisible compared to being able to do something unique. Whether or not I care about helping others on a given day, I don't have to live my life in fear that if the word got out that I could do X then I would never be able to avoid the people who wanted my assistance again.

Telnar

Re: Super-powers are a lot mroe visible than human abilities

[rowyn]

Telnar covers about half of my point. The other half is that my moral obligation to help people if I really am the only one who can help them goes up proportionately. Even in Everquest, I found myself feeling this to a certain degree. Yes, in real life, I can help others. But rarely can I take a minute or two of my own time to save someone else several hours of theirs. In EQ, I could do this by resurrecting people with my cleric.

If I felt vaguely guilty for not sacrificing a little of my time to save someone else several hours of time in a game, I can only imagine how I'd feel if it only cost me a little of my time to save someone's life.

I couldn't turn healing down if it were offered to me as an ability. I'm not sure I could decline to ask for it if I had the opportunity to do so. But I don't think I would wish this on myself--even though I always like to play clerics and healers in games. Even in those, I often felt that my "healer" characters ought to spend all their time, well, healing hurt people. This would be an awful lot for me to bear in RL.

[minor-architect.livejournal.com]

I have noted everyone's points. If the choice of any power was offered to me, I would still ask for healing - although it might be worthwhile to ask the "superbeing" who was doing the offering if it thought I was strong enough to accept such a power.

I respectfully withdraw from this conversation.