In science fiction we've had several terms for instantaneous relocation. The most common is "to teleport," but it comes with a lot of psionic baggage from a certain late-Campbellian fad for stories using mental powers. Then there's "beaming," as in "Beam me up, Scotty!" which is, of course, tied to a specific sci-fi franchise.

In searching for a new, evocative, no-baggage term, I first played with "to abscond." But since that word carries its own baggage -- implications of theft, escape, or kidnapping ("She absconded with a rabbit, two turkeys, Baby Lambkin, and the nuclear codes") -- I realized that it would not do.

From an earlier era, when Americans delighted in coining ridiculously complicated-sounding words, I found "absquatulate." It means to leave abruptly; in romance, it means the same as our text-age term "to ghost." But it's rarely used and is thus ripe for a new technical definition.

So in the Absquatulant Series, "to absquatulate" means "to be in one place and, with no lapse of time, to be in another place instead."

Technically, it's not travel at all. You aren't crossing any territory, you don't pass through any intermediate locations. There ARE no intermediate locations. You are in place A. Then you are no longer in place A, you are in place Sigma. At no point were you in both A and Sigma. At no time were you in no physical location at all. Your molecules were not torn apart, transmitted, and then reassembled at another location into whatever kind of being you are.

There is no disassembly. There is no reassembly. There is no transmission of any kind. There is no friction. There is no energy cost. It is a non-entropic procedure.

It is possible that, when you absquatulate, there might be a popping sound at your previous location, as air molecules instantly move to fill the void left by your absquatulation. But nobody has recorded the sound at an absquatulant's moment of absquatulation. Nor does there seem to be any displacement of objects at the point of appearance.

The people who absquatulate can be said to "absquat" or even, simply, "squat." They can be called absquatulants, absquants, absquats, squatters, or squats. They are absquatulating, absquatting, squatting, or "hopping," the term once used by a child and still sometimes resorted to.

If you are, in fact, an absquatulant, you and those like you can call your skill by any name you choose. But you are not in my stories. In MY stories, people with that power are absquatulants. They absquatulate.

But as long as you don't claim ownership of the term, you are free to use it. It's a genuine English word, and cannot be trademarked, anymore than it can be copyrighted or patented. So you can use it, for this or any other purpose you choose.

But within the pages of my few publications, absquatulate, absquatulant, absquatulator, and all derivative terms refer to instantaneous relocation, with no equipment outside of a mind to conceive of the new location and decide to hop.

What about people who like to tell or read or listen to stories about absquatulation and absquatulators? I have toyed with terms like absquatuspecs, absquicks, abspecs, or absquatunados. 

But if any such population should emerge, I will have no say about what they call themselves or each other. If you number yourself among such a group, I beg you not to call yourselves anything that derives from "Trek." 

Not because I hold Gene Roddenberry's creations in low esteem, though I do. 

Rather, "Trek" should be avoided because trekking as a means of relocation is the absolute opposite of absquatulation. 

Also, "trekking" is that most abominable thing: an English word that doubles the letter K to give it a verbal affix, like "ing" or "ed." There is and should be no double K in English. The only thing that's worse, in English, is a verb that doubles a terminal I: namely, "skiing."

This is not meant to be an interactive website. But if you would like to contact anyone associated with Llo Carter Enterprises, emails directed to admin@absquatulant.net may occasionally be answered, when I have time to set aside my day job.

On a personal note, since LloCarter is a pseudonym, I'm not going to test your patience by coming up with a lying author biography. Llo Carter, being nonexistent, went to school nowhere, has no university degrees, has no birthday, no horoscope, and no age. Llo Carter is not married, has no children, and while I have lived in every time zone in the coterminous United States, and have visited in every state but Alaska, in two different states in Mexico, and two provinces of Canada, my nonexistence cannot be assigned to any specific American location. Llo Carter will make no public appearances, autograph no books, issue no photographs or videos, and record no podcasts.

My books are offered by Amazon for Kindle and, if you're so wasteful of your money as to wish physical copies, they can be purchased in paper editions of however many copies you choose to order. Just go to Amazon and search on Absquatulant Series, and my publications will pop up fairly quickly, unless your standard of quickness is derived from your own experiences with absquatulation.

(And if it bothers you that the narrator of my books is known only by his half-mocking nickname of Elbow, I apologize. I have no idea myself what his birth-certificate name might be. So he is as nameless as I am.)

Publishing books on Amazon only works if readers recommend the book to other readers, who then buy and download or order those books in some form or other. This is obvious, yet my friends who know about marketing have pointed out that begging for likes, recommendations, or sales is a very human and particularly American thing to do. Modesty and the pretense of disinterest in money are downright un-American and should lead to deportation or imprisonment.

--- Llo Carter, 12 June 2025, United States of America