Aegis Sierra, Part 8

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

Jan 09, 2023

[Ed. note: status rough draft]

I was eating breakfast when the distorted voice drifted into my ears from a distant megaphone. “Dr. Sierra — this is the FBI. Surrender yourself.”

I grabbed my cardigan and my coffee and holstered my handgun. I walked outside and stood in the desert about twenty meters from that unassuming pink shack; the pink of the shack coordinating with the pink of the mountains in the early morning light. About 100 meters in front of me arrayed from one edge of my peripheral vision to the other was what looked like every FBI and ATF agent in Southern California along with all of their military equipment. I remembered shouting, “What — no air support?”

I knew they wanted me alive because they wanted to know what Korea had. Three agents started walking towards me. I shouted a warning. “Don’t come any closer. You don’t want to get hurt.” Either they didn’t hear me or they didn’t listen because they kept walking. They were about 70 meters away. I shouted again, adding “I’m serious.”

“You’re coming with us, Dr. Sierra.”

“No, I’m not. You should stop.”

The agent in the lead hit the Aegis boundary and disintegrated. I briefly saw a disturbing cross-section of a human body intersecting with the field before he vanished completely. In the same instant I heard several pops of impotent sniper rifles. The other two agents pulled their handguns from their holsters. In doing so, the tip of his gun grazed the boundary — he was pulled in and disintegrated. The third agent started backing away, breaking into a run.

There was some shouting in the agents’ ranks and one of the armored vehicles started driving towards me. It reached the 50 meter mark, 100 meters from the Aegis computer running in my lab, and it too was sucked into void. I walked back into my house.

The array of technologies they tried to deploy against me was fascinating. Someone at the FBI had the epiphany that sound could get through and so they deployed one of their LRADs. I just had to go into my underground lab to avoid it. They tried their microwave lasers, which did get through at low power. However, as soon as they cranked the power up the Aegis kicked in and blocked it. They erected a giant sun shield to blot out the sun thinking my field needed power from my solar panels — I had long since converted to a nuclear microreactor for primary power. Eventually this high tech standoff turned into the ten thousand year old tactic of a siege.

I originally had stocked up enough food and water for about two years in my bunker. A few months in, I sent a message crystal to my old colleague Lee Jae Seung with a short program that would generate the pseudorandom times of microsecond windows where I would deactivate the Aegis and he could send a message crystal back. His response came quickly; as an initial test he sent me a message crystal and a packet of ramyeon — I could potentially last forever.

Jae Seung’s message told me that my standoff with the fascist US government was all over the holonet across the world. A political cartoon with me as Tank Man in Tiananmen Square became a stencil graffitied across every major city. People had had enough of the terrorism of the teleportation age. People had had enough of the authoritarian nation-states ruling their lives. People had had enough of war.

Over the next year, the first of the Autonomous Zones began to appear. Kyoto Autonomous Zone. Lagos Autonomous Zone. Austin Autonomous Zone. Each established their own Aegis based on my system design through a network of hyperquantum physicists getting the design of the Aegis from Jae Seung and walled out the state by progressively increasing the range of the Aegis boundary. You couldn’t cause things to disintegrate this way. The Aegis depends on a change in horizon entropy relative to a baseline — setting that baseline at a slightly higher range just adds protected volume to the field. Something has to move inward across the boundary at a specific distance in order to generate the detectable entropy change. Additionally, I didn’t set it up to prevent things from moving outward. The Aegis field was a space you couldn’t enter, but could easily leave. This ratchet effect is what these enterprising Autonomous Zones used to slowly add territory — people were yearning for the nightmare-ending protection of the Aegis and joined eagerly.

In that first year, we also learned what happens when a hyperquantum computer attempts to establish an Aegis boundary that intersects with or encompasses an existing field1. The attempt by the algorithm generating the new field to read the horizon states corresponding to the existing field volume looks identical to an attempt to teleport an object into the field. The existing Aegis field scrambles the horizon states corresponding to the spacetime volume it is protecting as usual, distributing the incoming energy across the boundary. However, the new field sees the baseline it is trying to converge to suddenly change requiring the algorithm to reset and try again. The US government found that out the hard way when they tried to breach my Aegis field with a hastily built one of their own. Their algorithm (i.e. my algorithm) continuously reset over and over until they ran out of power.

One really odd consequence of these quirks of the early design of the Aegis was the sudden popularity of yo-yos. People used to walk around doing a trick called the forward pass — flinging a yo-yo out in front of you and pulling it back — to detect the presence of an Aegis field before you accidentally walked into it. Jae Seung and I worked on improvements in the algorithms via message crystal that would eliminate some of these quirks and drastically improve the safety of the system. You don’t want to accidentally disintegrate innocent people. Of course, I was still surrounded by the FBI and eventually the military — and growing tired of ramyeon.

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

I should add that this is threshold dependent. If the volume of an Aegis field is much smaller than the encompassing field, the encompassing field can “live with” the additional induced error and set a less restrictive threshold.