Aegis Sierra: Epilogue
Backstory to the development of the Aegis prior to the events of Inner Horizon as told by the inventor Dr. Miranda Sierra.
[Ed. note: rough draft]
In the first few years of its existence, thousands of villages, towns, and cities initialized their own Aegis fields. Filtering on incoming energy density or horizon entropy changes made the fields more efficient and less dangerous. No longer did people risk disintegration walking around near the edge of a field — a risk that was once preferable to teleporting bombs and mitigated by staying well inside your safe bubble. The technology advanced rapidly. It was out of my hands.
People developed a capability for the Aegis to filter on specific signatures, removing the vulnerability to chemical gas attacks, for example, while still letting air molecules through. The FBI had tried to tear gas my little pink shack, but I had an underground lab I could hide in. Now you could be safe from pretty much anything and an uneasy global peace started to form in the aftermath of the Crisis of the 90s. The fall of another age of globalization was ending. The global economy that had collapsed as it had many times in human history — the late Bronze age, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, World War I — started to come back.
The efficient Aegis filtering algorithms were the first step towards entropy reservoirs which allowed you to teleport objects in such a way that errors did not build up where you didn’t want them — your DNA, or more catastrophically the network of electro-chemical states that define our consciousness. Errors in the latter caused Kakutani syndrome in some of the early human test pilots; they would scramble your identity, your personality, your memory. The entropy reservoir acts as kind of waste repository for the inevitable errors in remapping the 10^42 bits of horizon states involved just in a human brain. You could focus the accuracy of the algorithm where you needed it and relax it where you didn’t.
The first working teleporter was built in Lagos by one of my old MIT colleague Dr. Jenna Yahaya’s students Dr. Aminat Wasiu. Jenna had moved back during the collapse of the United States into fascism in the 2080s. Aminat’s design cleverly used giant stacks of discarded 20th century optical disks (“CDs”) as the reservoir. Nowadays, quasi-periodic crystals with intensely complex atomic structure are used — for example, Holmium–Magnesium–Zinc (Ho–Mg–Zn) quasicrystals. From there it was only a short hop to the first hyperquantum drive. The first was a tremendously high risk design that also used the structure of the pressurized capsule as part of the reservoir to save weight and hyperquantum algorithm convergence time. If you go to the museum in Lagos where the capsule currently resides, you can see the flaking, decaying metal from the effect of just a few jumps.
The ship had to suspend itself for over 20 minutes carrying a hyperquantum computer, a gravitational neutron interferometer, as well as its passenger with limited life-supporting capability waiting for the algorithm to converge. Even then, it could only jump about 100,000 km along the direction of the gravitational field vector. It was too dangerous to jump anywhere below the GEO belt due the space debris at the time. That fact alone probably set back the date of the first functioning hyperquantum drive by 10 years.
The first hyperquantum jumps were more proof of concept than transportation. Not only was there no place to go, humans as a species were not ready to explore the galaxy — a fact that became clear to me on a warm summer day in Seoul.
The Seoul Aegis Region (SAR) had become a kind of de facto center of leadership, a trusted neutral party, among the splintered confederation of protected spherical fields ranging in size from tiny villages to the largest centered near Lagos that served more than a billion people. My communications with Lee Jae Seung during my standoff with the FBI had inadvertently established the protocols for long range communication between points that could not be held together with holonet fiber. As such, Seoul became a major communication hub for Earth.
I had moved back to Boston to help reconstitute MIT in the aftermath of the crisis of the 90s. My 8.942 Hyperquantum Algorithms class was extremely popular. I received a message from Jae Seung to come to Seoul — he said it was urgent. The 2110s were a tough time for global travel. Teleportation was not yet ubiquitous and most air travel was via small electric planes operated by independent pilots from airports (often just empty fields) near the edge of Aegis regions. There were two semi-regular teleportation routes at the time: Lagos-London and Seattle-Seoul. In those days, you still needed some pretty tight coordination on either side to e.g. pump down the receiving vacuum chamber so that you didn’t arrive with nitrogen and oxygen inclusions in your body — the hyperbends.
I set up a series of short hops from Boston to Seattle and then experienced my first personal teleportation from Seattle to Seoul. Computational efficiency was incredibly low so you practically come out the chamber with hypothermia. The Unruh bound in the Earth’s gravitational field in action: Tᶠ ≤ Tⁱ − g/2πk. However on the Seoul side you were greeted with a hot cup of ssukcha which mitigated the discomfort.
Jae Seung greeted me at the terminal with a grin — we hadn’t seen each other for almost 30 years. I instantly felt 26 again and almost went straight into talking about some paper I’d recently read like I would when we were back at MIT.
“I have something to tell you, but not here.”
He led me to a waiting car to take us back into the SAR.
We were crossing the Han river when he told me.
“I am so happy to be the one to tell you. We are not alone in the universe.”
Jae Seung’s speech became more and more animated — he proceeded to tell me about his “abduction”, the Intergalactic System, our status as a “conservate”, and the preparations for the formal announcement.
I seriously considered that he might be out of his mind, but we were pulling up the the old Korean National Assembly building now functioning as the SAR parliament. I was among the invited group of people to be there.
In those days, we mostly referred to them as “the visitors”. The human vocal sounds they suggested for the name of their species was 우따루, initially romanized as Utaru. The extra U’s in Uutaruu might have been added in Anglophone holonet media just to make it seem more alien.
The first emissaries wore a diaphanous translucent green hooded robe drenched in saline tat provided their cephalopodic bodies with sufficient moisture to operate in our atmosphere. There was a small tank near their head that provided the moisture to the garment along with a mist dispenser near their siphons. Through the translucent green robe you could see a multitude of ever-changing tattoo-like shapes shifting on their skin — seemingly subconsciously. Occasionally I’d notice whole passages of Korean form and disappear.
The Uutaruu originally used these patterns on their skin as communication millions of years ago, much like how our ape ancestors might have used a scent-based system to transfer information. They are telepathic — structures in their equivalent of neurons operate like hyperqubits that can read or write small amounts of data to any system capable of processing information through quantum resonance. The horizon limit is short, probably only 10s of meters at most. I am no exobiologist, though.
Some seem better at it than others — or at least better at telepathically communicating with humans. It takes them some time to figure it out and learning one human’s mind is not transferable to another. The Uutaruu have to learn the unique language of each of our human minds. That was fascinating to learn. Aside from our most instinctive thoughts, each human is completely different in how they think — a few thousand vocal languages, but 10 billion internal languages on our planet.
The Uutaruu had apparently been watching us since the last ice age. They converted some data they had collected to a video format as part of a cultural exchange — video from orbit of an early Anatolian Neolithic culture ceremony at Göbekli Tepe. That was when the Uutaruu were able to detect us. Not radio signals, not chemical signatures of our impact on our environment, but rather from our first large gatherings of conscious minds. It created sufficient information density to be seen on the Uutaruu’s own version of the Aegis capable of spanning megaparsecs. Sentience appears like stars when seen from the vantage point of holographic horizon states. Our first hyperquantum jumps prompted them to make an introduction.
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) had shut down in the 2050s having never seen anything. Of course they wouldn’t have. Electromagnetic waves, interceptable and falling in strength with the inverse square of distance, were basically useless except during an extremely brief period of time in our history from when they were first discovered in the 19th century to the advent of hyperquantum computation in the 21st — a scant 200 years in 10,000 years of technology. And the solution to the Fermi paradox? Yes, there was life and it had been around much longer than we had. There was a UN for the galaxy, the Intergalactic System, and it was 90 million years old. However, in their wisdom they forbid interference with new forms of sentient life through a kind of nature preserve — a conservate — until they’re about to start jumping around the galaxy. Meanwhile our thinking had been stuck in an SO(3,1) universe bound by Einstein’s speed limit and beams of light.
For several weeks before I’d arrived in Seoul, preparations for our first inter-species, inter-stellar diplomatic conference had been underway. Representatives from several Aegis regions — Aotearoa, Lagos, India — were in attendance. A lot of philosophers, historians, and ethicists were consulted. As the Uutaruu are telepathic, this issue of language was largely moot — nor could they hear us anyway. You still speak when they are communicating, but that is mostly to crystalize our own thoughts to make them easier to read.
Some people in the past had done some rudimentary work developing a “contact protocol” but being purely theoretical humans did what they almost always do — generate a few ideas and then put it of due to a lack of funding. On the other hand, the Uutaruu had done this multiple times in the past few thousand years. Certainly every species is unique; they respond with a combination of evolved instinct and conscious choices. The path the Uutaruu had suggested was fitting in my experience of human behavior: a visual demonstration of overwhelming power with just a few touches of wizardry to pique our innate curiosity. They’d land one of their giant starships in front of the SAR Parliament building. Everyone on Earth knows the story from there.
As a species, we are babies. Those pictures of Göbekli Tepe were like our parents showing us photographs of our first birthday we don’t even remember. I don’t know what the future holds for us, and we’ve messed things up pretty badly when left to our own choices. However, I’m optimistic now for the first time since I was a young scientist — we have mentors. We weren’t ready and we aren’t ready — but we will be.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Epilogue]
© Jason Smith