Aegis Sierra, Part 1
Backstory to the development of the Aegis prior to the events of Inner Horizon as told by the inventor Dr. Miranda Sierra.
[Ed. note: status]
I remember the day I understood I had to save humanity from the failing idea of Westphalian sovereignty clearly. We had to have a process to opt out of these archaic legal frameworks, these poorly abstracted identities, that did not provide for it — to form our own. The nation-state’s negation of the freedom from fear inevitably initiated its own negation in my work.
I was still in DC when the ruling came down — it was a hot morning, but weren’t they all? Carbon dioxide was pushing a thousand parts per million. The ice caps were long gone. DC was below sea level, protected only by poorly constructed levees contracted out to the lowest bidder. It was worse than all the projections from earlier in the century — all because of a ruling like this one.
I was checking my messages at a holonet terminal in Union station and saw the headline in the news summary — “6-3 Supreme Court rules 2nd Amendment Protects Individual Right to Quantum Weapons”. At the level of the nation-state, the stalemate of mutually assured destruction had passed almost seamlessly from the era of the nuclear bomb to the era of the quantum teleporting bomb. More rational nation-states, including our own until that point, had banned individuals from having the silicon matrices needed to build personal hyperquantum computers above 10x10 qubits. Technology progressed to the point where a quantum computer allowed you to teleport the regular structure of a crystal first a few meters, then a few kilometers. It was the newest form of the gun — and like every form before it, it would change society.
The ruling was shockingly expansive — not just failing to regulate precision 3D printers that could produce SiMats but striking down the 10x10 limit as arbitrary. I had provided expert testimony in earlier hearings and material for the amicus briefs before the Supreme Court. I knew the technology was progressing so quickly that in just a few years you could use a 3D printer to build a personal quantum computer that could support the calculations necessary to teleport the more complex structures of explosives that militaries and national research labs could. Just like what happened with global warming, the expertise of Miranda Sierra was no better at getting through than had the expertise of Michael Mann.
As the Union of Concerned Scientists had predicted, hundreds of new quantum computers were built in garages across the US after the ruling. Many were individual efforts; some were foreign state organizations; several were criminal enterprises. The saddest were the naïve amateur scientists who died trying to teleport themselves before the theory of entropy reservoirs was worked out. Research labs would not fund these kinds of efforts — considered too unethical even to be tested on animals. It is possible that secret military projects I was never indoc’d to tried it but they certainly would have failed as the understanding just didn’t exist until the past few years.
The horror stories started to pop up with increasing regularity. Men murdered their domestic partners with teleporting projectiles. Heists that teleported away doors graduated to heists that just teleported away the goods. These were thought of as “normal” crimes at the time. There was still motivation. There was still property. They could be solved — and many were. The darkness had not yet come.
Shortly after the ruling I left my academic position at MIT and moved to that now well-known plot of land on the outskirts of Yucca Valley to set up my own garage lab. From the outside it was a pretty nondescript pink building at the beginning — similar to all the others dotting Joshua Tree and Wonder Valley. However, if someone had counted the area of the solar panels on the property they might have questioned what I was doing. I began my work on the Aegis.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Epilogue]
© Jason Smith