Guidance Withdrawal chapter 3

[Radivis (Michael Hrenka)]

@Zobeid

The teleportation at the beginning was hard enough for me to swallow.

Why exactly?

@Zobeid

Well, I thought, maybe it’s just a completely virtual environment, then teleportation is not a problem. But since then I’ve seen many hints that all this is supposed to have physical reality.

Right, the setting is supposed to play in an apparently physical reality.

@Zobeid

I could swallow some form of teleportation in the real, physical world, although the way it’s described seems very problematic.

What do you see as problematic about it?

@Zobeid

And yet now, we have multiple physical realities somehow existing in parallel in the same space?

The realms are different “virtual/augmented reality skins” placed on a physical base reality that is the same for all realms. This inherently limits how far different realms can differ from one another. In particular, changes in the topography in one realm have effects on the topography of all other realms. I see that I need to be more clear about that in this chapter.

@Zobeid

If you really want to use science fiction as a serious tool for exploring future possibilities, then it really ought to be done as hard science fiction that works with the known laws of science, and I’m not seeing that here.

That’s debatable for the reason that it would seem unlikely that in a realistic future their technology would be strictly and completely limited by our current understanding of science. The teleportation technology in this setting at least seems to bend those rules of science we currently understand. The same is true for the nearly perfectly efficient mass energy conversion technology which hasn’t been mentioned in this story, yet. On the other hand, there’s no FTL travel or true time travel in this universe. I’d say the story has an appropriate degree of “hardness” for exploring many interesting points.