The original note, as written at the time
A group of University students in Uganda discover a form of space-time manipulation. They find a way to teleport. However, here are the rules. One can only space burst along latitudinal lines. Since according to relativity, gravity binds space-time, one cannot teleport faster than the spin speed of the host planet. Because of this, if one started his space burst when the sun is overhead at point A, it shall still be overhead when he arrives.
Ongoing development
The first rule we found by accident and the second rule we found by nearly killing Ssemakula.
You cannot burst north or south. Only along a line of latitude, east or west, and only as far as the planet will let you in the time you have. That is the shape of it, and it took us three months and a broken arm and a great deal of arguing on the roof of the engineering block to work out why.
The earth is turning. Whatever holds space to the ground is turning with it, and you cannot outrun the thing that is holding you. So if you step out of a point at nine in the morning, when the sun is straight overhead at that point, you will arrive somewhere the sun is also overhead, and nowhere else. You do not get to choose the time. The time is the price.
Nakato worked out the arithmetic on the back of a lab sheet while the rest of us were still saying it couldn’t be done, and then she looked up and said: so we are not travelling. We are waiting, in a different place.
That is the part that frightens me, and I have not told the others. We are not moving through space. We are letting the world bring the destination to us. Which means that the thing we are doing is not travel at all. It is standing still in a place we do not belong, for hours, and hoping the planet is faithful.
We have done it eleven times. Nine of them worked. The tenth put Ssemakula in a ditch outside Mpigi with his arm in the wrong direction, and on the eleventh we did not tell anyone what we were doing, and we are not going to do it again until we understand what the eleventh did.
Because the rule is not about distance. The rule is about the sun, and we do not yet know what the sun is doing.