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September 24 - November 7, 2019
Callum had brought two assistants with him from Delta Pavonis. Eldlund was obviously from Akitha—the Utopial’s main world, orbiting Delta Pavonis. Like all people born into the Utopial movement today, sie was omnia: genetically modified to be both male and female, spending hir adult life in a thousand-day cycle between genders.
Kellan Rindstrom’s discovery consigned them all to the history folder marked: “quirky inventions that never made it past the concept study.” When you can connect two separate physical locations via a quantum entanglement portal, so many problems cease to exist.
Even so, starships require a phenomenal amount of thrust to accelerate up to a decent percentage of light speed, and Connexion Corp’s modern designs achieve in excess of eighty percent. Before Rindstrom, that would have required carrying vast amounts of energy and reaction mass on board. Now, all you do is drop a perfectly spherical portal into the sun. Meta-hot plasma slams into that hole at near-relativistic speed. At the same time, the portal’s exit is fixed at the apex of a magnetic cone, which channels the plasma into a rocket exhaust. There is no limit on how much plasma from the sun you
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“That must make your citizens feel so much safer. What is it every authoritarian government says? If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.”
Callum closed his eyes, trying to remember his physics. “If you expose plutonium to moist air, it oxidizes and hydrides, then it expands by…” “Up to seventy percent,”
It was twenty-three years since the China National Sunpower Corporation had dropped the first solarwell into the sun, a simple spherical portal that plasma poured into, whose twin was sitting at the bottom of a giant MHD chamber on a trans-Neptune asteroid. The solar plasma flared out of the chamber like rocket exhaust, its powerful magnetic field generating a phenomenal current in the chamber’s induction coils. In one masterful stroke of ingenuity, the Chinese had solved Earth’s energy drought. Now the entire planet’s power came from a multitude of solarwells, producing vast amounts of cheap
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“Society has been under siege from malicious elements for too long now. Law and order must be paramount for any civilization worthy of the name to flourish, especially now we are all neighbors, one step away from each other. Those who do not accept due process, who refuse to acknowledge the democratic mandate, are a cancer on society. And it is a terrible irony that our very liberalism allows such danger to flourish. There has to be a time when we say: no more. And thanks to Connexion, that time has now come.
And the rest, they all care about one another. They’re friends, they face danger together on a weekly basis, they party together, they share the bike. But this…” He stared at the sunlit happy faces, trying to absorb the camaraderie. “To willingly go into an unknown exile together. To make that sacrifice, give up your whole life. Unanimously. I don’t believe it.”
“No, not owe. Trust. They trust him. Every time they face a disaster, they trust him with their life. He plans every operation. We think they take risks, but actually they don’t. Callum’s too clever for that. He’s got backups and fresh angles and cutoffs all worked out in his head long before they actually take that one step into a danger zone. And that’s what we’re dealing with here.”
“No,” Yuri said, suddenly angry. “What they do—what they have done—goes way beyond simple criminal acts. They seek to destroy anything they dislike, no matter that it is enacted legally, or how many people are dependent on it. They smash and ruin others’ endeavors freely, and feel nothing. That is what cannot stand, not anymore. For once I agree with Ainsley and his ultra-rich political collaborators. Your friend Akkar and his allies have been judged, and found guilty.
“When the original Space Age was underway back in the 1950s and ’60s, part of the ideological struggle was the hypothesis surrounding first contact. The Soviet Union postulated that any civilization advanced enough to travel between the stars would logically be socialist, and would therefore choose to deal only with Moscow.
getting a second chance is the greatest human dream and delusion we have. It even outranks religion.”
“It is,” Yuri said. “But look at what the Olyix have done to us.” “They brought knowledge.” “No, they didn’t; a few clever chunks of biotechnology, that’s all. Not real knowledge, no revelations. They’re the greatest example of passive-aggressive we’ve ever known.
Their advanced biotechnology produced the polyfunction Kcell, which could be assembled in a number of ways from veins to skin, bones to muscle, and even some organs. Like the flesh they replaced, they drew energy from blood, living in perfect symbiosis with the human body, and they were also cheap.
The versatility of Kcells was the root of the whole brain transplant story. Kcells, so the theory went, could be used to form a neural bridge between brain and spine—an ability still far beyond human medical science.
The aliens themselves were indefinable by human standards in both biology and gender. Every Olyix defined itself by its mind, which was always distributed between its quint: five bodies linked via a form of quantum entanglement between the neural structure of its separate brains.
“That such a criminal concept has taken root in human culture is most distressing to us,” Hai-3 said. “This is not why we made our biotechnology available to you. We only wanted to help you before we fly onward to the God at the End of Time. Death is not something biological entities should suffer anymore. I hope you can explain that to people in your media companies who have influence—perhaps upon the successful conclusion of your case?” “Of course.
That also meant the boys had to learn how to communicate those commands at a subliminal level. The process was symbiotic.
“I’m not sure any of the glands are amphetamine-based. They won’t act as a serotonergic agonist.”
“Yes. The muncs can read every single body language posture the boys produce. They understand and respond to it all, big or small, refining the simple verbal orders. It’s the closest we’ll ever come to telepathy.
It was utterly captivating. Crazy, too, that it was 384,000 kilometers or one footstep away. He always thought some little part of the human brain rebelled against quantum spatial entanglement.
A hundred years previously, people on Earth carefully recycled the last generation’s garbage, breaking down matter into its component atoms, refining their castoffs and sludge into useful compounds, ready to supply manufacturing and microfacturing industries. But now, with so much raw asteroid matériel streaming in at minimal cost, that energy-intensive processing of recycling old things was no longer financially viable.
Opportunity is equal. People are not. In our society, you can progress as far as your talent and enthusiasm can reach.”
Here everyone receives a fair share of society’s produce, no matter the level of practical contribution you make. If you choose to do absolutely nothing for your entire life, you will still be fed and clothed and housed, and given access to medical treatment or education without prejudice. But in reality, a life of total leisure, or sloth, is rarely chosen. It is human nature to want to perform some kind of activity. The difference is we do not require it to be what the old communist and capitalist theories interpret as economically viable. With the introduction of Turings and fabricators, the
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Jaru was the only child of a wealthy Thai family; hir father had made a fortune in property development as Thailand’s prosperity grew. They had been estranged when the elder Niyom had died from a stress-induced coronary at sixty-one, never quite able to come to terms with his cherished offspring becoming kathoey. Most assumed the more gentle Jaru would let the company dwindle, but the family’s entrepreneurial gene wasn’t recessive. Hir inheritance came at the same time as Kellan Rindstrom demonstrated quantum spatial entanglement.
“Age can be wisdom. It depends how you spend those years.”
Ideology is a sick-soul-meme; it gnaws basic decency away until you can self-justify the most extreme acts as worthwhile to further the cause. Any cause.”
“No way,” I said. “There’s no such thing as interstellar war. There is no conceivable reason for it. Once a species gets off its birth world, it effectively has infinite resources. It wants for nothing. Total war is something that belongs to history for anyone who can reach orbit and beyond.”
Interestingly, it was Nahuel, the Buddhist monk, who was keenest to talk to me.
That was what gave us our first clues that the Olyix weren’t being entirely honest. The rear quarter had a density that couldn’t be accounted for by the cavities that the Olyix said made up their engineering and propulsion section. It
“Ah.” The cardinal held up a whiskey tumbler and smiled contentedly at us. “This is why we are here, is it not? We are the ones who understand: Above all, you have to have faith. Cheers.” He downed the shot in one.
“The Olyix always arrive in vessels like the Salvation of Life. It is a subterfuge that allows them to observe the species they’ve discovered before they elevate them.” “Elevate?”
Jessika’s expression turned sorrowful. “Because I am Neána.” “What the fuck is that?” “Alien, but not an Olyix. We’re very different.”
“The Olyix’s journey will not take them billions of years,” Jessika said wearily. “Their enclave is an extremely sophisticated manipulation of space-time; minutes pass inside it, while the millennia flow by outside. It is what makes them so difficult to fight.”
1901…Guglielmo Marconi transmits radio message across Atlantic Ocean.
2002…Neána cluster, near 31 Aquilae, detects electromagnetic pulse(s) from atomic bomb explosions on Earth.
2047…The US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency reveals artificial atomic bonding generator—the so-called force field.
2063…November: Space-X flies a QSE portal into LEO on a Falcon-10, providing open orbit access. Commencement of large-scale commercial space development.
2069…First solar powerwell portal dropped into sun by China National Sunpower Corporation. Five-kilometer-long magnetohydrodynamics chambers built at Vesta, positioned on large asteroids, outside Neptune orbit.
2077…Interstellar-X launches first starship, Orion, propelled by QSE portal solar plasma rocket. Destination Alpha Centauri. Achieves .72 light speed.
2144…Olyix arkship Salvation of Life detected 0.1 light-year from Earth as its antimatter drive is switched on for deceleration.
2150…Olyix begin to trade their biotech with humans in exchange for electricity to generate antimatter, allowing them to continue their voyage to the end of the universe.
2204…Portal starship Kavli arrives in Beta Eridani system, eighty-nine light-years from Earth. Detects beacon signal from alien spaceship.
