Aegis Sierra, Part 7
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]
One of the few bright spots of the start of the teleportation age was the reunification of North and South Korea. It started with Koreans in the south teleporting messages to distant relatives in the north etched into crystals using hyperquantum computers in the US up and down the West Coast. These message crystals were effectively holonet data storage crystals, so could be easily mass produced. The messages were soon followed by food aid. It eventually became fashionable in Seoul to have a US company teleport provisions to secret locations in North Korea with every ramyeon purchase. It was a massive open source smuggling operation that evolved organically into a successful rebellion.
China was initially ambivalent towards the collapse of the regime in the North, a failed state they were spending more and more resources and political capital to prop up. However that ambivalence turned to paranoia with the surge of Korean nationalism in the aftermath of the reunification — Joseon restored. Tensions mounted and the world feared a repeat of the fall of Taiwan.
It was during that mounting threat that I received a message crystal from my old colleague Lee Jae Seung. He had moved back to Korea after reunification and was leading the entire national defense science effort. The tone of the message was dark — he was aware that China’s hyperquantum capabilities vastly outstripped those of his country. He asked me about a few shortcuts he had devised in the algorithms that could allow you to network the hundreds of 3x3 and 9x9 qubit systems in Seoul into a more formidable weapon.
I realized that Jae Seung had figured out the exact corrections I needed to distribute the incoming mass-energy for the Aegis to work without redirecting the threat to a random (and potentially worse) location — a kludge that had been required because current systems just weren’t fast enough to perform the calculations before you were dead. You could send the incoming mass-energy in not just one random direction, but every direction — it would evaporate into thermal energy at the Aegis horizon.
I quickly coded up Jae Seung’s corrections into my test system in my lab and turned it on. A beautiful spherical pink and green glow appeared centered on the hyperquantum computer. It was about two meters across — precisely where it should be. It was strange being able to visualize the effective horizon for the first time.
That glow would have been instantly recognizable by any hyperquantum engineer today — the telltale sign of too low a mass-energy trigger threshold on your Aegis resulting in the gas molecules in the air hitting the effective horizon being disintegrated and the energy being spread across the shell, ionizing the oxygen and nitrogen in the air just like an aurora. You’d never set Aegis level 3 on a planet like I did that day. I accidentally gave myself the equivalent radiation dose of a few hundred x-rays.
I turned up the threshold on my remote terminal across the underground lab. The glow flickered and then disappeared. I grabbed an old GPU card sitting on my desk and threw it at the computer. It hit the shell and disintegrated with a flash of auroral glow and several unsecured papers flew up as if caught in a breeze. It worked against directed mass-energy — now what about trying to teleport into the bubble? That test was already set up, so it took me all of five minutes to run it — successful. My detection and re-direction algorithms had been working for years; I had been stuck on what to do with the excess mass-energy. The system probably could have worked well enough if you were desperate enough to deflect incoming threats randomly a few hundred meters away. In fact, I would have set it up to do just that if I had been raided by the FBI before the breakthrough.
I wrote everything up — the detection algorithm, the re-direction algorithm, Jae Seung’s corrections refactored for the Aegis framework — and encoded them in a message crystal to teleport to Korea. It was a few days before I received the short response — “It is working. Your aegis may have saved us.”
I remember the news reports being confused when China first acknowledged the beginning of the conflict. Some thought it was a deliberate misinformation campaign. Why is China claiming successful teleporting strikes on Seoul when there is literally no evidence anything is happening? Rumors of lost divisions attempting to cross the northern border leaked out. One of the effects of the horizon entropy change as something comes in contact with the Aegis protective boundary is a temporary but locally extreme gravitational gradient — disintegrating objects are pulled into the Aegis field. My papers had “fallen” towards the disintegrating GPU. A soldier pointing a rifle wouldn’t have time to react if the muzzle came in contact; his unfortunate comrades trying to find him would meet similar fates as the field makes no sound and a person has no time to scream. There’s little warning of the field boundary unless you see something disappear in front of you from a safe distance. Having never seen anything like it, I’d imagine they’d be perplexed.
Once the Chinese military started to get a handle on what was going on — initially they thought their spy planes, tanks and soldiers were being teleported away by a novel implementation of the standard application — they resorted entirely to teleporting attacks. With no reliable communication and no satellites since the onset of Kessler syndrome, it was some time before any of the still functioning world governments amid World War III believed Korea’s diplomats when they said they had a way to neutralize all of China’s attempts to attack.
Someone in the United States’ fascist government put two and two together in one of those meetings — Korea’s chief hyperquantum physicist Lee Jae Seung and noted hermit slash mad scientist Miranda Sierra had worked together decades ago at MIT. It took them months longer than I thought it would.
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Epilogue]
© Jason Smith