Hector's first teleportation

Hector's first teleportation is the decisive accident that transforms the dueling machine from an instrument of simulated combat into a device capable of altering physical space. During an experiment with Geri Dulaq, Hector is transported from one booth to another at the instant that fear and imagination summon the image of Major Par Odal. The event leaves the building without power, protects Geri from an imagined assailant, and establishes the physical reality of Hector's psychonic teleportation ability.

Experiment and Immediate Setting

Hector's jump begins as an attempt to discover whether the dueling machine can do something besides conduct duels. Geri Dulaq asks Hector to show her what the machine feels like and wonders whether the apparatus can make imagination real. The request shifts the machine's purpose from controlled contest to shared exploration: instead of projecting combatants against one another, it creates a common experiential space in which the users' thoughts can acquire apparent substance.

When the experiment starts, nothing happens immediately. The screen then glows softly, chiefly green with a trace of blue, and Hector finds himself floating beside Geri in a dreamlike green world. The scene is peaceful enough for Geri to describe it as their own world, free of troubles and dangers. Its calm depends on separation from the external world, however. Hector knows that the two participants remain in booths roughly thirty meters apart, while war is brewing elsewhere and Major Par Odal is still waiting to commit another murder. The imagined refuge therefore carries the danger it seems to exclude: the political violence outside remains present in memory and thought.

Fear Becomes a Physical Event

The turning point comes when a dark shape emerges from behind the rocks in the shared landscape. It is Major Par Odal, presented as slim, dressed in black, and deathlike. Geri screams for Hector to help her. At once, everything goes black. The sequence makes no clear distinction between an external projection and a psychic intrusion; Geri's fear supplies the immediate force of the event, while the dueling machine supplies the medium through which that force becomes operational.

Hector opens his eyes in the booth beside Geri, with his arms around her protectively. She is shuddering and explains that the result was her fault because she thought about Major Par Odal. The bodily aftermath is more decisive than any abstract explanation: Hector is no longer where the experiment placed him, and his protective response has already begun before the mechanism is understood. Geri's thought does not merely produce an image. It coincides with the collapse of the simulated world and with Hector's unexplained arrival at her physical location.

The event also brings Dr. Leoh into the room. He finds the pair together while all the lights and power in the building are off. The blackout gives the episode a measurable material consequence and prevents the teleportation from being dismissed as a visual illusion. The machine has consumed or redirected an extraordinary amount of energy at the very moment the displacement occurred.

Dr. Leoh's Investigation

Dr. Leoh studies a recording of the experiment repeatedly over three days, running it at least a hundred times and timing the sequence down to the picosecond. The tape shows Hector and Geri moving happily through the green environment like humanized dolphins at ease in the sea; then Major Par Odal's sharklike form cuts into view, Geri screams, and the scene ends. The power failure occurs precisely at that point, within only a few picoseconds by Leoh's calculation.

The physical timing rules out an ordinary escape from one booth to the other. Leoh estimates that he saw Hector in his own booth about thirty seconds after the power failed, perhaps even as little as ten seconds later. That interval is too short for Hector to disconnect himself from the neurocontacts, leave his booth, and reach Geri's booth. Both booth doors were closed as well. The machine's layout and the recorded timing thus turn an apparently impossible movement into a technical problem rather than a matter of mistaken observation.

Leoh initially resists the conclusion because it seems farfetched. The only answer he can see is teleportation. The dueling machine is already known to amplify natural telepaths, and Leoh recalls reports that some telepaths can move small objects without visible physical force. He therefore considers whether the machine has amplified that talent too, drawing enough energy from the building to move a human body. His caution remains important: he recognizes that he has a theory, not a complete explanation, and wishes the booths had contained tape cameras that could have shown the movement directly.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Hector's first teleportation changes the meaning of the dueling machine. Its power is no longer confined to simulated duels or to the representation of imagined environments. Through the conjunction of Geri Dulaq's thought, Hector's protective impulse, and the machine's amplification, psychic content crosses into physical action. The device becomes an engine whose effects cannot be contained by the boundaries of its booths or by the intentions of the experimenters.

The episode also fuses emotional intensity with technological discovery. Geri's fear is not a decorative reaction to the appearance of Major Par Odal; it is the immediate condition under which the machine produces its most startling result. The event moves from serenity to threat, from shared fantasy to blackout, and from uncertainty to the possibility of genuine teleportation. Imagination is shown not as an inward retreat but as a force capable of reorganizing bodies, distance, and power consumption.

Hector soon carries the consequence into another demonstration. After a later duel ends, he shoots up and starts toward Dr. Leoh's booth, while the newsman emerges shaken from the other booth. That contrast places Hector's new capability against the ordinary physical and psychological consequences of the machine: the newsman is white-faced and unsteady, whereas Hector is propelled toward Leoh by the urgency of what has happened. The first jump is therefore both an isolated accident and the beginning of a new understanding of Hector's powers, one that makes the machine a source of discovery as well as danger.