Aegis Sierra, Part 2

Backstory to the development of the Aegis prior to the events of Inner Horizon as told by the inventor Dr. Miranda Sierra.

Jul 01, 2022

[Ed. note: status]

I finished my PhD in 2076 — in my thesis I had derived the first practical method for perturbative gravitational corrections to the information entropy of the effective horizon states. I had my choice of postdoctoral positions and decided on MIT because I loved Cambridge. Boston was one of the few coastal cities that had managed to save many of the indigenous trees from the underground inundations of salt water that came with the rising sea level.

I was so young and at first didn’t understand the collaboration offers from scientists at Draper Labs a few blocks away. It wasn’t until one of my colleagues, Lee Jae Seung, gave a brown bag talk showing that the number of qubits required to teleport a macroscopic object was feasible with the current generation of advanced hyperquantum computers that it became clear. After he reached his conclusion several different technical arguments broke out at once. What about the no cloning theorem? The Buzek-Hillery bound? The Bekenstein bound?

The consensus at that lunch meeting coalesced around the idea that simple regular objects wouldn’t have to be reconstructed perfectly — a few different nuclear spin states or lattice dislocations wouldn’t make much of a difference in a diamond. Someone — no one remembers who — did a back of the envelope calculation using Jae Seung’s method on the whiteboard to show it would take billions of qubits to teleport a few chromosomes without destroying them. The room was quiet — I think a lot of us were disappointed. We didn’t know about entropy reservoirs at the time.

All of us who were there remember clearly what came next. From the back of the room Dr. Jenna Yahaya was looking out the window and asked “What about uranium?” We all knew her question wasn’t about the crystal structure — it was about how much. None of the structure mattered — only the individual atoms. It turned out to be a few hundred grams with the hyperquantum computer in our lab. It was one of the most advanced in the world. You would just need a few such systems to simultaneously teleport a few hundred grams of U-235 each to a single location which turns it into a straightforward guidance problem.

Who do you call when you think you’ve stumbled on the design of the worst weapon ever conceived by humans? That was why Draper Labs was trying to work with me — they were already working on it and just needed help with the gravitational corrections to improve the accuracy of the teleportation across a large distance in the presence of changing spacetime curvature. In the pall of dread in that room, I stood up and told my colleagues about my plan to see how far along they were.

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Epilogue]