Aegis Sierra, Part 3

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

Jul 09, 2022

[Ed. note: status: rough draft]

I set up a ruse that our group at MIT was going to try to teleport a macroscopic object and then return it using a nearby hyperquantum computer — and that Draper labs should join us. I contacted Adam Davis. He had previously told me about their research group’s computers in an email to me regarding a contractor position with them he thought I should consider.

Meeting in his office was full of awkward silence — it was due to the fact that so much of what I was discussing was classified from his perspective. He said it would be easier for us to talk if I took that contractor position and got a security clearance. I was in.

It took a few months, but I started that fall.

They gave me a tour of the facilities on my first day. The group had been working with another at Los Alamos National Lab. They were having difficulty teleporting test objects to a single location there from the two computers at Draper Labs — a project called Montgomery, a reference to the engineer on the Enterprise. This kind of appropriation for projects antithetical to the original creator’s intent was apparently pretty common.

The location the test masses materialized was almost random and they didn’t understand the cause. The project had been halted due objects materializing inside walls of nearby offices and causing extensive damage. Only a few tests were done so there weren’t enough statistics to confirm anything. Some of the test masses were never found.

Before it was shut down, their hypothesis for the primary source of error were the gravitational fluctuations from the traffic near the facilities so had tried to do the experiment at night so there were fewer fluctuations. It didn’t work — but in retrospect it was close. In theory, the law of large numbers should have kicked in for long range teleportation, and all that should have mattered was the large scale perturbations of the gravitational field — the work in my thesis should have been able to account for it.

During that tour I had one of those moments that come maybe once or twice in a lifetime. I saw a whiteboard with their error budget — they didn’t realize they were making assumptions about the local gravitational field vector that introduced more error than the large scale perturbations derived from detailed satellite maps.

The local field vector changed based on everything from the tides and the moon to traffic and even people walking near the apparatus. That initial gravitational field measurement was key to the coordinate system and any error there would be magnified at longer and longer range. The horizon states would be mixed with bulk states if the local field vector was off even slightly. The law of large numbers didn’t work because the local bulk states were mixed in and their entanglement on the horizon led to correlations. It was the long range gravitational corrections that were higher order. Because the local vector was off, the algorithmic cooling would get stuck in a local minimum produced by those correlations and introduce noise that would degrade the effective performance of the hyperquantum computer. Basically, to have overcome it you’d need a computer with a hundred times as many qubits as we had at the time.

It’s not too hard to look like you are making progress while not actually accomplishing anything — it’s just a strange way to work. No one caught on to my ruse, and the time I spent reviewing their work created a foundation critical to developing the Aegis decades later.

The DoD was risk averse and so shut down project Montgomery after only a few more months of stalled progress. They reverted back to the path of teleporting a more complex explosive mechanism from a single location at shorter range. My contract thankfully was not renewed and I was debriefed. However, I had been successful in my mission and our little rebel group that formed at that lunch meeting would be moving on from gathering intelligence to political activism after a fortunate coincidence.

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