The Quantum Magician (The Quantum Evolution, #1)

by Derek Künsken

Belisarius was good at lying. He had a perfect memory, and every Homo quantus had to be able to run multiple lines of thought at once. Most of the time it didn’t matter which one was true, as long as they didn’t get mixed up.

An inflaton drive. He wondered if she was lying. He usually could tell, but he didn’t think she was. She was tamping down her own pride in the telling. How did they do it? Inflaton particles carried the inflationary force that caused the ongoing expansion of the universe. In some theories, a wave of inflation was self-reinforcing, a runaway effect. Their own drive could destroy them. And the energy cost must be enormous. Then it clicked. “Virtual inflatons,” Belisarius said. Iekanjika started. Virtual particles were pairs of particles and anti-particles that could jump into existence as long as they vanished back into nothingness quickly enough.

Belisarius found a set of files containing the mathematical formulations of the time travel device. The work was frustratingly inelegant, but after some minutes, he worked out that it described a pair of wormholes, only dozens of meters across, imperfectly bound to one another, forming a one-way bridge across eleven years of time. They’d found not one of the forerunners’ wormholes, but two, stuck together by some accident of orbital mechanics. A pair of wormholes bound together would give off all sorts of quantum-level interference, probably the odd electromagnetic fields he’d felt when approaching the fleet. The wormholes could be nearby. Then it hit him: they were only a dozen meters in diameter. The Expeditionary Force was carrying the pair of wormholes in one of their ships.

In the early days of quantum theory, scientists and philosophers had argued heatedly over the meaning of the quantum wave function, and what the superposition of states meant. What did it mean when a single electron could pass through two slits at once? Reality at the atomic level was slippery. This slipperiness had been made famous by Schrödinger’s cat; the cat who was entangled in the uncertainty of the quantum world because its fate depended on an observation. Some argued that the cat became part of the quantum world, assuming a similar duality of states: neither dead nor alive. Others argued that the experiment itself created new universes, one in which the cat was dead, and another in which the cat was alive. Both interpretations carried so much baggage that neither view won out. If either of them had, the Homo quantus, and Belisarius,

Consciousness turned probability into reality. The goal of the Homo quantus project had been to engineer humans capable of discarding their consciousness and subjectivity so as not to collapse quantum phenomena.

The quantum intellect found the thin filament of probability that connected the entangled particles within the vast frothing of the quantum world. Nerve endings in the Belisarius physicality created signal transduction cascades within muscle cells, causing spindle fibers to rotate the orientation of the sub-cellular magnetosomes, which shifted the magnetic field around the

Instead of humans who could predict economic outcomes or see novel military strategies, the very nature of quantum perceptions created a species inclined to contemplating abstract interacting probabilities. The Homo quantus plumbed the nature of reality, but became mired in arcane ideas rather than concluding anything of immediate benefit to humanity.

A breathless excitement crept into him, like he was fourteen again, creating a new theoretical framework for wormhole physics with a girl he wanted to kiss.

The Puppets were biochemically hard-wired to always revere their creators, the Numen. Despite this biochemical cage trapping each Puppet, the Numen still feared the adoring slave species and engineered them to grow only to a miniature adulthood.

Yet some Puppets were still worse off. Chance mutations could generate Puppets without the physiological infrastructure to detect the pheromones of the divine humans. Such beings could not in any way be trusted on the Puppet world, Oler.

The Homo eridanus were bitterly ugly, man-sized, having no human features at all. Whale-like skin covered layers of insulating fat so thick they could wholly retract their inhuman gray arms into their blubber. Instead of legs, they had thick tails that might have looked more suitable on walruses. And where humans had faces, the Homo eridanus had been engineered with wide fish mouths, large enough to gulp anoxic water and force it over starved gills. They had electroplaques beneath their skin, like the Homo quantus did, for navigation and speech. Two black eyes, as big as eight balls, placed to optimize binocular vision, had no capacity to emote.

“I’ve found out how to move past my instincts, as all rational beings must.”

“Have you read Milton’s Paradise Lost?” Belisarius and William shook their heads. “It’s a bit of a reborn classic among the Puppets. It has a number of messages, but the important take-away is the nature of Lucifer’s suffering. To be out of the presence of God is to suffer.”

Beyond those two ships yawned nothing but stars for thousands of lightyears. His ocular augments could collect other wavelengths of light. He could step down X-rays and ultraviolet and step up radio and microwaves, bringing them all into the visual range, while telescoping his vision until blooming flowers filled the immense emptiness on the surface of his sight. And yet, like a fractal, for every starry point, infinite volumes of hard vacuum lay just beyond, pulling at him. The Homo quantus lived in those infinite spaces, dreamed in that emptiness, where the quantum world frothed without observers. It was a lonely home—not because they were alone, but because in those spaces, they themselves became no one at all.

Once you and I were something, Bel. And when you offered me the data, and the chance to learn something, I thought you were offering more.” “I am offering more.” “You can’t offer to diminish me and call it more, Bel.”

“Is the air too thin for you on those mountain tops, patron?” He used the old French word for boss, which carried a double meaning—a term of respect to the leader’s face, and a word to cast derision behind his back.

“The people who made the Puppets worked with the same mechanism,” Bel said, “except backwards. The Puppet brain can’t have dissociative disorders. There’s no way for the Puppets to avoid the religious awe of the Numen.”

“I miss home,” she said. “Home is where the mind is. And soon, you’ll be seeing so much, your brain will be full.”

: )

“Why?” Belisarius felt his jaw tighten. “The Puppets are born with the certainty of who they are,” Belisarius said. “The truth of the Homo eridanus stares them in the face, presses on them every second of their lives. Homo sapiens have had their questions answered a thousand times over by all the generations of history. “The Homo quantus are ephemeral. We touch nothing. We do nothing. We question, independent of meaning.

Space-time expanded. Time slowed and widened. The quantum intellect stopped its forward movement. Its internal gyroscopic senses at first delivered nonsensical values. After some seconds, it concluded that it was floating in an eleven-dimensional region of hyper-space. The quantum intellect was only four-dimensional: length, width, height and time. Most of the seven new dimensions open around it were spatial, but some were temporal.

Energy, momentum, wavelength, diffraction and wave propagation all had other behaviors in eleven dimensions.

The intellect slowly built a map of the kaleidoscopic space and recorded everything it could. Internal gyroscopes, now calibrated to eleven-dimensional space-time, detected a slow drift. The intellect was drifting along a low-energy path. Based on the map it was constructing, this path would eventually cross the entirety of this higher-dimensional space all the way to the other mouth of the paired wormholes. In eleven years, the intellect would emerge eleven years in the past.

Belisarius subjectivity, spoke a voice in his head. It was his voice, speaking robotically. It was chilling. “What?” Belisarius asked hesitantly. The partitioning was successful, the voice said. The Belisarius subjectivity and the objective quantum intellect may process in parallel, exchanging only classical information.

For five centuries, scientists had queried the quantum world, one measurement at a time. The Homo quantus project had been designed to bridge those two worlds. But the partitioning of his brain had turned Belisarius into one more scientist detached from his equipment. It made him almost human again, except that he did not own his body.

In some way, the engineered death sentence that had been hanging over him since he was a teenager had retreated. And something bigger had happened. He’d experienced new knowledge so profoundly, so enormously, that his life before and life after could not be compared. He’d touched raw hyper-space. He’d moved through the naked geometry of space-time. He’d been engineered, and issued near-fatal flaws and new senses that had never found their ecological niche. Except now they had. No baseline human ever could have experienced or even appreciated what he’d seen and the experience was as religious as anything felt by the Puppets or Saint Matthew.

But the quantum intellect would not find the algorithms that ran Belisarius the subjective person, no models to predict him; if there were any, they shifted in the moment, making him a creature of inscrutable probabilities, like a quantum event. A non-conscious hyper-intellect could not model the behavior of a subjective consciousness.

he was not a person who could be switched off by an accidental slip into the fugue. His victory was a frightening evolutionary step.

He’d come so far. He’d left the Garret angry and frightened and bitter. He’d learned a new world and hid from his old one, and yet, in the end, his two worlds had interacted, like overlapping waves of possibilities. And somehow, in the interference of his two worlds, his anger and bitterness were lost, his fear was lost, and he’d been able to embrace his old curiosity. It was the nature of quantum logic that sometimes mutually exclusive states could coexist.

neither had dared get too close to the time gates yet. They wanted, needed, to explore them together. Nor had they plumbed the depths of the new structure of Belisarius’s brain, and the tentative peace he’d found with the quantum objectivity running there.