Aegis Sierra, Part 5
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]
We had not anticipated the rate of advancement of 3D printing technology. The FBI had been monitoring an amateur 3D printer holonet forum based on a tip that user homebrewSi, Michael Orr, had made claims of successfully fabbing a 3x3 silicon matrix with the latest 3D printer on the market. These matrices were legal on their own, but producing them was not. It was not unlike the issues with 3D printed guns in the early 21st century. Orr’s braggadocio worried some of the other members and one of them contacted the FBI tip line.
The Justice Department built a case against him on charges of unlicensed production of silicon matrices along with ITAR and export control violations due to the forum having ports in Canada and Europe. The defense was taken up pro bono by libertarian groups and the NRA under the theory that the supposed danger was no greater than a common TR-16 available in sporting goods stores across the US.
In the first trial, a video of our demonstration from a decade earlier was played alongside a new demonstration of a man with a TR-16 shattering a similar concrete block. I volunteered my services as an expert witness, but the US attorneys said that they didn’t want me on the stand being maneuvered into testifying that a 3x3 matrix could not produce the results we did back then. Regardless, Orr was found guilty. He appealed.
The appeals wound their way through the courts and ended up at a very conservative Supreme Court. The diversity of supporters of the status quo appeared remarkable. Republicans and Democrats. Defense contractors. Foreign governments — even dictators and monarchs — sent diplomats. The Jeffersonites, the Christian sect forged in the climate change-driven droughts of the desert Southwest out of an amalgamation of Christianity, libertarianism, and Constitutional hagiography, set up a vigil with the reclusive Malachai Jefferson himself leading the prayers. He saw the destructive potential of misrepresenting the founders’ intent as great as those rulings that gutted Federal environmental protection. However, unlike those rulings, this would be a decision that reached beyond national borders.
I worked with the UCS legal team to provide an amicus brief. After oral arguments the court watchers all seemed convinced that the ruling would likely be narrow in favor of allowing individuals to produce their own 3D printed matrices up to the legal limit set by arms control limitations with no implicit regulation of the printers themselves. We knew this to be a mistake — allowing 3D printer technology to progress unfettered by the products they could fabricate would force our response to any violations of the 10x10 matrix limit to be reactive. The matrices would already be built and the toothpaste would already be out of the tube.
The ruling was far more expansive than the court watchers had predicted. It not only left the 3D printers unregulated, but ruled that the 10x10 matrix limit was arbitrary and Congress would have to develop a new rule based on an actual threat to national security. It turned out there was one constituency that might not have had the numbers, but did have the money — technology CEOs and venture capitalists. Stories would come out later about the justices’ dinners with them and their agents. The unified will to maintain the status quo evaporated when it meant Republicans had to muster real political capital not just to take on the tech lobby, but to take on their own Supreme Court justices for what was considered a theoretical problem. Given the deadlock in Congress at the time, it would take a few election cycles to overcome — all without any demonstrations as dramatic as ours to focus the public’s attention.
This was asinine; judges pretending at being physicists. Elements of the ruling showed a complete lack of understanding of the underlying technology with several basic errors about hyperquantum computation. However, it did allow me to buy a 3D printer with enough capability for my lab in the little pink house on the outskirts of Yucca Valley — capitalism and the nation-state sowing the seed of their own negation.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Epilogue]
© Jason Smith