Aegis Sierra, Part 6
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]
The dramatic demonstration did come. I wonder if those six Supreme Court justices had a chance to realize their role in their own demise — reaping what they had sown? A reconstituted ELF teleported an explosive device into the courtroom during oral arguments for a case widely believed to result in further curtailment of environmental protections in the pursuit of corporate control of natural resources — this time it was the limited sources of fresh water after global warming induced sea level rise and drought. It was followed up with a message that the other two branches were next. Martial law was declared in the United States with the legislative and executive branches retreating to undisclosed locations.
I didn’t get the news until about a week later while trying to go to a hardware store in Twentynine Palms and encountering a military roadblock. I was turned around — the government was under the mistaken impression that the ELF did not have the capability to teleport an object from further than a few kilometers so the search area was limited to the DC area. I was able to return to my lab and do a bit of “teleport mining” to create an underground bunker to hide all of my equipment from the crackdown I knew was coming. Kessler syndrome had rendered LEO impenetrable decades earlier, so it was a pretty safe spot for tailings. I treated the Morongo basin to a more active Perseid meteor shower than usual that August. A few loads teleported into some space debris producing a bright explosion. Later hyperquantum engineers actually used the reports of those brilliant flashes to estimate the probability of teleporting a space capsule into an object at LEO at nearly 5% — incredibly risky and a setback to would-be hyperquantum space travel.
That crackdown came to Yucca Valley a few months later. The FBI confiscated the 100 qubit hyperquantum computer I had set up to sate their curiosity — the renown hyperquantum physicist must have a hyperquantum computer, right? As we predicted, the government could only find a fraction of the systems across the US — many were likely hidden in the same way I hid mine.
The domestic focus faded pretty quickly as the crisis of the 90s deepened with seemingly every terrorist group around the world launching their own attacks to defend their ideologies before their computers could be seized. It gave a hint of how many of these groups had set up in the US with its regulatory framework struck down. It also made clear that small groups were capable of striking thousands of kilometers away — the “genie” was out of the bottle.
Because the world believed that the US was responsible for incubating the horror of teleporting bombs in the hands of individuals, sanctions were authorized by the UN. The turn in the US to martial law and fascism made it possible to recognize the politically weak oppositional “continental congress” as the legitimate seat on the security council in an inverse of the 1971 decision regarding China; the US could not veto the resolution. The long eroding international order — the Pax Americana — broke down completely and World War III began. I’ll leave the details of the war to the military historians. Unfortunately, a working version of the Aegis was still a few years away.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Epilogue]
© Jason Smith