Aegis Sierra, Part 4
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 rough draft]
In February of 2078, Dr. Shibuya Rei at the University of Tokyo started the movement to ban quantum weapons (“No Q”) with a press conference held symbolically at the foot of the Genbaku dome. Her speech hit me both with hope and sadness — I winced at the line about humanity having the unique opportunity to stop these weapons before they were built. However, it freed me to talk about the horrific possibilities without going to prison.
I had joined the Union of Concerned Scientists as an expert on hyperquantum computing and the chaos it had unleashed over the previous two decades as every possible encryption algorithm fell one after another. Like climate change, this was one of those areas where the work was more about putting the toothpaste back into the tube.
After the announcement I volunteered to lead the UCS effort on teleporting bombs and enlisted several of my colleagues. No longer in jeopardy of going to prison for spilling classified data about the possibility of such weapons, I could go to the press with the timeline we were looking at.
We decided to put together a demonstration. We had been working in secret on a way to measure the local gravitational field vector accurately enough to control the teleportation. We had settled on a gravitational neutron interferometer — the prototype for the GNI “genie” that’s now in every hyperquantum drive.
We called up The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. We set up a room — we used a crystal to hide the actual capabilities of our system as the regular structure of a crystal requires far fewer qubits to reconstruct than more complex objects.
Our point was simple — you didn’t need to teleport nuclear bombs in order for this to be a threat. We teleported the crystal into a block of concrete. If you do this without simultaneously removing the material at the destination as we do in your everyday teleporter today, a significant number of the atoms will appear close enough to initiate strong chemical interactions, thermal collisions, and even particle scattering producing detectable amounts of radiation. It’s not terribly different from the energy released launching a projectile close to the speed of light into another object — except it is happening in our rest frame. The concrete block exploded dramatically.
I drove our point home. I told the assembled press that given the rate of technological progress within a decade a home hyperquantum computer could do this. We needed to act now. The key bottleneck at the time were the silicon matrices that formed the interface between the qubits and the classical computer. Our proposal was to regulate these components that could only be produced in specialized foundries.
I was impressed at the speed the bill went through Congress. A couple months later silicon matrices above 100 qubits were banned domestically and all sizes were added to the ITAR and export controlled lists. A simple electronic component had been regulated more forcefully than fissile nuclear material. The foundries that could produce the matrices were taken over by the Department of Energy and only a few research labs around the country were allowed to build hyperquantum computers.
Within the year, every country on Earth had joined the ban on commercial production and distribution of silicon matrices. This energy fueled the “No Q” movement and several governments disclosed their own strategic teleporting bomb development programs. We learned that dozens of nations already had working systems — the nuclear club became the much larger quantum club. However, Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties were put in place (START V and START VI) and the nuclear truce passed on to the quantum truce. A tenuous peace. I returned to academic work with the dread lifted.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Epilogue]
© Jason Smith