World building for Inner Horizon
Concept art and other notes
The various regions protected by their own spherical Aegis fields (story starts here in the 2070s) eventually in the 2100s form a kind of new “international” collective with a parliament called the Aegis Regions Collective (ARC). This evolves into the Aegis Regions Union (ARU) that includes off-world settlements by the 2130s-2140s. Here’s an initial take on what the ARC map looks like when it sets up1:
Areas outside are either ecologically devastated or dystopian from the environmental disasters (e.g. southern Florida is mostly submerged from sea level rise) or the warfare of the “Crisis of the 90s” (the 2090s — the teleporting bombs). At this point in history, the Aegis fields set better thresholds so are no longer as dangerous unless you try to move high energy density across them. Among the other developments was that hyperquantum computers in the ARC could be used to solve the economic linear programing problem ca. 2110 and so established a functioning socialist economy without money2.
Around the time of those first off-world settlements, when the ARC has evolved into the Aegis Region Union (ARU), it covers >95% of Earth’s population looks more like this:
When the Orion Union (OU) forms in ca. 2150, many of the individual fields are consolidated into a planetary field with the original Aegis regions surviving as traditional labels for groups of members of the OU parliament. At this point, the Earth has mostly recovered from the dystopia of the early 2100s and the environment has been restored by the 2200s.
These are all pictures taken from the internet with some filters applied — trying to set up a feel for what Earth is like in the late 2300s (the setting for Inner Horizon) with environmentally sustainable living.
Re-made the Orion Union symbol — previous version was a stylized representation of the Orion Nebula that looked like a bird (see e.g. here). Changed it to be less painterly and more iconic — and with a nod to the Federation seal from Star Trek. Points of the star represent a few of the off-world colonies at the founding of the OU and the conic piece represents the direction to the stars of Orion’s belt as well as the direction of human’s Natural Growth Path3 as set up by the Intergalactic System (IS).
Due to the invention of hyperquantum drives that allow you to teleport, there’s less need for fast vehicles that operate in the atmosphere — typically they just need to get high enough to make the gravitational field environment smoother as well as reduce the air density surrounding you so the hyperquantum computation converges faster. As such, most air vehicles are electric prop planes or drone-like VTOL flying saucers. Grabbed some random pictures from the internet to give a feel for transportation:
Put together a technological-political timeline that I’ll be putting up soon.
There were a couple pieces of technology mentioned in the Aegis Sierra story: “holonet”, “SiMats”, and GNIs. Here are some more details about them:
Holonet: One of the first thing that happens with the advent of hyperquantum computing in the 2050s is the breaking of all encryption for anything using digital data stored as volatile 1s an 0s in any combination of electrons, electric or magnetic fields4 — thus any data connected to the internet. A quick kludge fix was to essentially print out QR codes to store data — almost a step back to punch cards. However, since a great deal of data traveled over optical fiber by the 2050s eventually a system of holographic laser encoding of data etched into crystals5 that was physically read with photons travelling down optical fiber was put in place — holonet. Given their crystal structure, they could be teleported with early hyperquantum computers so were also used for that early on. However, the requirement for optical fiber to be directly routed to the crystals (and the need for a physical location to store the crystals), you generally had to go to a holonet terminal — much like a phone booth of yore. A holonet account required a particular frequency- and phase-coded crystal to be carried by each user. The other half of the story was that because of the rampant deep fakes and lack of verifiable sources on the internet that began in the 2020s (even before to the capability to hack anything connected to the internet) a lot of humanity took the view that “the internet was mistake” and so did not bother to start it up again with holonet. The inconvenience of having to go to a terminal also meant that it was mostly people who had to use it for their job along with a few hobbyists who set up their own communities. These eventually become less prevalent except in older places on Earth or other off-world communities in the 2200s as teleportation becomes more common as well as the need to communicate between locations without optical fiber connecting them. The internet still exists, even in 2393, but it’s more a “hive of scum and villainy” with servers maintained by people who want no part of the ARU or OU. (It’s the 2390s equivalent of a steampunk aesthetic.)
SiMats: Silicon Matrices. These were the first mass production components that provided an interface between the qubits and the conventional processors in ordinary quantum computers in the mid-2030s. Eventually they could also be used to interface with hyperqubits when the manufacturing tolerances improved by the 2070s — and even 3D printed by the 2080s. Prior to the 2070s, hyperquantum computers required custom hardware.
Gravitational Neutron Interferometer: GNI or “genie”. This is a device for precise measurement of the local gravitational field vector (which determines the holographic direction in entropic gravity) required to seed a hyperquantum computer accurately enough to perform teleportation or set up an Aegis field. The theory for the interface and feedback system was worked out by Miranda Sierra in the early 2080s. As its name suggests, it is a neutron interferometer. These continue to be used even in the time of Inner Horizon (2393). Even using χ-ability to find the vector on human starships involves the person with χ-ability being given a joystick to align the interferometer (other species have different interfaces).
This is schematic as the projection shouldn’t show all size circles mapping to circles (that’s a stereographic map projection) — on the Mercator shown here they would be only close to circles for small circles. Just wanted to have a population density map where I could make the Aegis “spheres” pop out.
The economy functions essentially by creating lists of requests for goods or services alongside lists of tasks to be completed to fulfill those needs — people can select which ones they want, which they do out of a desire to be useful to society. As I put it in a precis on the world of Inner Horizon: After the horrors of the collapse of nation-states, most humans have adopted a view that you want to produce a surplus for society, rather than owe a debt to it. Hyperquantum computers enable everyone to select the kinds of work that they take on. The hard part of the economic problem becomes too much surplus — and preventing the over-extraction of resources — driven by the human desire to be useful. Billions of home gardeners produce the food needed out of love and pride and people prepare it out of devotion to culinary excellence. Nearly every production good is one of a kind, with similarities deriving only from trends of fashion and popular imagination. Teleportation has removed the toil of extracting the mineral resources of planets. Even the starships of the Orion Union’s Diplomatic Mission are hand-crafted by groups of hobbyist-engineers seeking the inner reward of accomplishment.
The galaxy has been explored by other species for on the order of a billion years already, and the Intergalactic System was set up some 90 million years ago to better handle the evolution of new species that might be millions of years behind others. The “natural growth path” is a simple algorithm that computes which planets a new species that develops hyperquantum drives would have moved to in the absence of any other species in the galaxy. It’s analogous to programmed cell death as established species are required to give up star systems when new species appear — it’s one of the ways peace between the various groups of aliens is established in the galaxy.
As any volatile memory being used during encryption/decryption algorithm processing must be inside the causal horizon of the system interacting with it, a hyperquantum computer (HQC) has access to both sides of the algorithm. A HQC can test a cryptographic system with a signal that can be match filtered to its representation in hyperquantum states revealing not only how that crypto system is mapped to horizon states but how it processes those bits. Effectively, anyone with a HQC has access to not just both red and black sides of any cryptographic system, but the internal transition. This is to say it’s not because HQC’s are faster or more powerful than standard quantum computers or conventional processors (even though they are), but because HQC’s operate in a state space where both the HQC and the cryptographic device are necessarily linked by causality.
Per footnote 3, a holographic encoding does not exist in a particular point in space, but is spread across the entire substrate making the exploit exponentially more difficult. Also, since the reading photons are required to be in a quantum state set by the user’s access crystal there is an added layer of two-factor authentication. This particular technology was eventually coupled with a coding created by individual human DNA and turned into a holographic tattoo called an embed that functioned as data storage and FPGA-like processors. By the 2300s this technology is ubiquitous and individuals have essentially all the “software” that would be used to run a device (e.g. flight controls for a vehicle, word processors, sensor control) running in their embed tattoos with a short range optical or RF link with most “devices” being a dumb terminal (thin client) or simply an interface to the hardware.
