Teleportation Constraints

A legal jump is over before a witness can finish a breath, but the body remembers it longer. That aftershock is part of the rule, not an accident.

Teleportation in this canon is not magic and not unconstrained instant movement. It is a short-range harmonic relocation event that depends on the same lawful field behavior as Quantum Space Harmonic Wave transit.

Core Limitation Set

Every legal teleportation event requires all of the following:

1. Direct line of sight between origin operator and target endpoint.
2. Local quantum-space harmonic coherence sufficient to hold a relocation lock.
3. High available power reserve to drive the relocation pulse.

If any one of these fails, teleportation must be treated as unsafe and non-executable.

Why Line of Sight Is Mandatory

Teleportation lock is built from observed endpoint geometry, not inferred geometry. Opaque barriers, heavy particulate fields, or active harmonic distortion break endpoint certainty and invalidate lock quality.

Operationally, this means:

• No legal blind jumps through walls or around corners.
• No legal jump to stale sensor-only coordinates without visual confirmation.
• No legal jump into boundary ambiguity zones without a verified visual lane.

The rule reads as an abstraction until somebody has to satisfy it on a clock. In Sightline Window (S01E02C04) a hull-fitter is sealed on the wrong side of a containment door with under three minutes of useful consciousness and a six-minute walking route, and the entire jump turns on whether Dr. Iona Vale can find a true optical lane to an endpoint she is not willing to place a body into unseen. She finds one through an emergency inspection port that six years of maintenance logs had carried as decorative. Particle occlusion crossing that lane cost fourteen per cent of lock confidence in real time — which is what "narrow, unstable" means when it is written down afterward as a tolerance figure.

Physiological and Clinical Cost

Reported transit sensation is commonly described as similar to electroconvulsive therapy: brief, disorienting, and neurologically intense even when the jump is technically successful.

Canonical medical risks increase with repeated or poorly timed teleport events:

• Elevated risk of anxiety symptoms.
• Elevated risk of depression symptoms.
• Increased likelihood of central fatigue and post-jump cognitive slowing.

These effects are measurable, cumulative, and require enforced recovery protocols in formal operations.

A minority of jumps executed at or near active boundary zones produce a distinct clinical picture the Medical Corps tracks separately: see Post-Teleport Ascension Stress Disorder.

Energy Economics

Teleportation is energetically expensive compared with ordinary local movement. The relocation pulse requires a large short-duration power draw to force coherent matter-state remapping through the local harmonic field.

For this reason:

• Teleportation is reserved for high-value tactical or rescue cases.
• Stations throttle jump frequency to protect grid stability.
• Teams must budget power for life-support and shielding before authorizing teleport events.

The order of magnitude is on record: the Threshold rescue pulse drew twenty-two per cent of local ring reserve in 1.8 seconds, which is why the honest answer to how much does this cost us was that life support would notice a second one. A station does not ration jumps because the draw is theoretically large. It rations them because the draw competes, in the same minute, with the systems keeping everyone else breathing.

Why Gravity Is the Whole Difference

Teleportation and Quantum Space Harmonic Wave transit run on the same physics, and their safety records have nothing whatever in common. The variable is gravity.

A relocation lock is held against the local harmonic field, and a gravity gradient is a continuous distortion of that field. Every item in the constraint set above follows from it. The power draw is what it costs to hold coherent matter-state remapping open across a gradient. The sightline rule is unforgiving because a distorted field leaves no margin for inferred geometry. And the clinical picture — the electroconvulsive comparison, the cumulative cost, the enforced recovery — is what a body records after being remapped through one.

QSHW transit does none of this in a well. A vessel phase-locks in free fall or close to it, where the field is quiet enough that a corridor either resolves or does not, and a failed lock produces a lawful abort rather than a survivable injury. That is the whole of why interstellar transit is routine commercial infrastructure while a two-metre jump across a containment door is a Medical Corps event.

The clearest demonstration is the one every generation of engineering students rediscovers and the constraints file has never moved on: a surface-to-orbit jump fails all three conditions simultaneously — see Ascent Javelins, and note that bulk ascent by jump has never been certified anywhere in the Concord.

The rule the Medical Corps teaches from this is deliberately blunt, because the intuitive version is backwards. Distance is not what makes a jump dangerous. Standing on something massive is.

Continuity Constraints

• Teleportation always relies on quantum space harmonics; there is no separate mystical teleport mechanism.
• Gravity is the safety variable, not distance. A jump made in a well is expensive and physiologically costly; the same physics in free fall is ordinary FTL infrastructure. Stories may not invert this.
• Stories may show disagreement about policy, but not about these physical constraints.
• Any chapter featuring teleport use must identify sightline status, energy state, and post-jump condition.

In the Record

The three-condition rule above is not a background regulation the stories inherited; The Harmonic Price (S01E02C05) is the room where it gets written, hours after the rescue that made writing it unavoidable — and the argument that shapes it is about whether to include an exception clause. Thorne, who had just authorised a jump on a thin margin, wanted one on the grounds that a rule nobody will keep under pressure protects only its author. He was talked out of it by the observation that a clause excusing him in advance is exactly what stops a good officer from feeling the weight of the call. The published constraint set has no exception clause for that reason.

See Also

• Sightline Window (S01E02C04) — the constraint set under a three-minute clock
• The Harmonic Price (S01E02C05) — the protocol being written, exception clause refused
• Quantum Space Harmonics — the same coherence law, at corridor scale
• Post-Teleport Ascension Stress Disorder — the boundary-proximate aftermath tracked separately