by Randy Moffat
Woo didn’t.
In style Woo was a plugger. A person who made progress by small increments rather than inspirational pole vaults. She had begun, whenever she could find the time, to again tinker with the faster than light communications. She tried this and that for a many weeks time without significant result, but at least efficiently eliminating possibilities. Then one night while half waking a new idea had struck her. Quantum resonance. The very small. There was something about it that caught her imagination. She held up the germ of an idea to the light while she brushed her teeth. It twinkled. She had been thinking bigger. Now she set to work to see if there was money to be made leveraging the Petrovski effect down at the Quantum level.
Hurdles rapidly came into view. For example, the McMoran rig that generated the Petrovski effect was capable of putting out paired particles linked at some level below Plank length as originally predicted. As a particle transmitter it could be made to work fairly easily. The thing was that there was no corollary of a particle receiver yet.
Essentially the McMoran engines generated paired messenger particles for gravity in twin cyclotrons and spit them out like a sprinklers from each end of the ship. The design called for only one set of the particles to be expelled for warping the space time continuum and providing locomotion at the bow while their pairs were expelled aft and in the opposite direction. Theory indicated that this version of schizophrenia was allowable since the apparatus treated each particle set as a discreet quantum entity and fired it individually to create a mass-like effect. That was theory at least.
Woo had talked in detail to Aziz, their mathematician and to Petrovski himself when she could find him around the obscure hours he seemed to be keeping. The more conversations that Woo had with the TESS brain trust meant she identified even more challenges. For one thing, if the ship went into motion it was traveling in a piece of space that for the duration of its flight was isolated from the rest of the universe. No communication appeared possible with it until it actually stopped and turned off the McMoran engine. A second challenge was that the speed of the particles that might convey a message still had to kow-tow to the speed of light limit even if the anomaly they created with those particles did not. This meant that a mere stream of particles could travel fairly quickly in human terms across the planet earth, but out in the vastness of space it meant that the Gaia or any ship equipped with a McMoran engine would rapidly outdistance those paired particles traveling alone and then have to wait for them to catch up. Catching up could take many years, decades or centuries—negating any utility. She thought she had a solution.
The first notion that Woo had twigged recently was that when the McMoran rig was not actively generating fields to move a ship, it was essentially at idle. It was doing precisely nothing. A great big paperweight—a paperweight that might be used for something else. Something really small. Like generating messages… and mailing them.
Woo studied the problems of cosmic mail. In days past when she had been doing her initial studies on possible uses for the Petrovski effect for communications another Q-Kink team had been looking into whether the Petrovski effect could be weaponized. At least they had tinkered around with the notion until that team had been pressed into service of ship building and general operations too. Woo dug up and read their initial reports and notes. It appeared from their write-ups that the destructive effect of Gravitons interacting with matter did have some limits—primarily range. Their report contained a beautiful set of tables they’d developed showing those limits that they had worked out and documented. This corresponded to what she knew about her own communications limitations from her initial stabs at it almost a year before. The weapons utility team’s final concept for a weapon had centered on trying to narrow the Petrovski effect down into a tighter beam—something like a laser or traditional particle beam. It turned out that no matter what width the beam they generated was, it always heavily degraded on impact with Baryonic matter; essentially stuff composed of atoms stopped it. She read more carefully. It turned out it stopped it bit by bit. Every rock, every pebble, every grain of sand and every molecule along its route was an interaction point that expended a tiny part of its energy. The result was that the Petrovski beam started out well enough, but it would rapidly dissipate. This was particularly true in atmosphere where every gas molecule reduced its efficacy. In space it was a bit better of course, but even ‘empty space’ had a great deal of dust and gas in it that eroded the Graviton beam. This had not been a problem when using it as an engine since the Petrovski field of gravitons were continuously renewed by the engines as it surfed the matrix of space-time. Degradation by matter only became an issue when there was only a pulse of particles being sent out and then they were cut off.
Woo had concluded that ‘beaming’ a message would not work then. The message would die just as the destructive effect itself had died. A larger sized field would not improve things either. It might take slightly longer to degrade, but it too would ultimately collapse.
For long distances it appeared that it would be easier to simply take a message aboard a MacMoran drive equipped ship and fly it to the point where communication needed to occur rather than trying to send a message using just particles. Space age pony express the only obvious solution.
Almost. Woo was stubborn.
She got to thinking about her area of expertise. Her experience included routers. Data was sent along internet connections through routers in discreet packets. Each packet contained a certain amount of information embedded in headers and footers that told the message where to go and who it came from. Late one night this arrangement casually suggested to her half asleep mind the bow wave to stern wave arrangement of the ship under movement inside a Petrovski field. As she envisioned a ship surfing the question arose in her mind. Was it possible to construct an ancillary system that could send out a small Petrovski “field” in an oval or a sphere shape without the engine behind it? The idea expanded as ideas do. What if a necessary stream of information existed as a message… . would it possible to then trap the communications information inside one of these packets of gravitons? What would happen if not a ship, but radio waves themselves were trapped inside a Petrovski field? After all, the Petrovski field isolated the space inside it from the rest of the universe.
It had taken her a long time using borrowed near engineering expertise from Warrant Officer 3 Shea Killien and her boyfriend Pinta. Bribing them with several cases of beer. After a couple months of tinkering she had finally constructed a crude rig that mounted onto the side of an existing Petrovski engine. The hardest part had been to organize and program the software that made it work to switch functions when the drive was not in use as a hyper drive to shunt particles into her new rig and create a quantum Petrovski field instead of one that could surround an entire ship. A miniature version of the main engine field.
In keeping with her vision though the computer code had to first elicit the McMoran engine into creating a data signal that contained a burst of information. The original Q-Kink idea had been to embed meaning in particles that could be sent in a stream with variations in it, The variations could be read and interpreted—rather like Quantum resonance or Quantum teleportation. Woo was Chief of TESS communications. After some lost time she realized she did not really need anything as complicated as that if her idea worked. If she could make the notion blossom into reality the communications trapped inside the field could take any form she chose. The easiest was the tool at hand. Bursts of particles. Particles were easy. Primitive radio waves were simply charged particles giving off electromagnetic energy as they accelerated towards the speed of light. They could be anything. Take any form. Even something ancient like Morse code. She tested the engine for message generation and sent out static bursts of code using particles. Dit-dit-dot. Some modifications to her software coding and she got it to work very reliably. She had a down and dirty message format that was a reinvention of a cosmic te
legraph. Done!
Then she started out trying to solve the hard part. She had to isolate the message content from the rest of the universe inside a graviton field. The static bursts would rest there, rather like an letter inside an envelope. The particles of the burst held in stasis, isolated in a kind of tiny pocket universe. It took time but she began to gain proficiency in creating very small Alcubierre metric envelopes. In a month she had mastered her technique and discovered a new challenge. By generating the message and Petrovski field simultaneously using the drive apparatus she was able to create a tiny Petrovski effect that surrounded a message. She also discovered through this process that there was a limitation in the form of a time factor. It took the field generator around a billionth of a second to form her Petrovski field. In that same nanosecond she could generate something like fifteen letters using engine bursts. This meant the message length she could cram inside the carrier field was essentially two or three short words or one long one. To send a sentence would require several sends of packets. To send a long document would require hundreds or even thousands. Woo had shrugged. Message brevity was meat and potatoes to naval communications personnel. She had accomplished her primary goal. The generated micro-field would surf the space time matrix just as a ship did. At least it would until the graviton shell disintegrated through impact with Baryonic matter at the rates already proven by her experiments and those of the weapons team. In this way the message would then theoretically be released and could be delivered intact to a receiver, but would have done so at the ‘speed’ of a TESS ship rather than standard radio waves. She breathed a thanks to the memory of Van Ziegler who had helped her with much of the coding before he had been killed so horribly. She even honored him by using the name for her Petrovski ‘envelopes’ that the dead Lieutenant 3 had dropped casually during a late night software session they had spent together. She called them ‘Alcubierre Bubbles.’
Once she had solved all that, she still had problems. She toyed with her new apparatus. She sent field after field and recorded everything. Woo meticulously built up and refined her new communications model to make it routine. It worked. Then it worked again. In time, she perfected the tools she needed to predict reliably just how long after its creation the miniature fields would last in various mediums and matter density conditions. She did not really develop a theory. She just tested them the old fashioned way—empirically. She sent out sample after sample until she built up a set of predictive tools that averaged her results.
Like many experiments, she was at first disappointed by her results. A single Alcubierre bubble appeared to contain only enough energy to travel no more than a few kilometers in the Earth’s atmosphere and a few thousand kilometers in ‘empty’ space. Her tests finally confirmed this to be an Alcubierre bubble’s maximum range. She toyed and played with various variations in the aspects of power, matter and a variety of other factors. Ultimately she got an independent Petrovski event to go just under fifty thousand kilometers in outer space by using a great deal of initial energy. Her outer limit now seemed to give her a message delivery to a distance that was less than a quarter of way to the moon from the earth. It might do for communications if sender and receiver were both in orbit around the planet, but was good for little else in the foreseeable TESS future. As it stood it would work only slightly better than radio if sender and receiver were in range and worse beyond.
It depressed her. Her depression slowed her down for a week and half. Repeated orgasms were a relaxation technique for her. She found and made rather energetic love to Pinta until he was utterly exhausted. She seemed to draw inspiration from his snoring. His convulsive snorts gave her jolts of clarity from a half dreaming state of her own. She wrote up half a notebook of ideas while Pinta slept on oblivious. Her real epiphany came to her while she lay beside him late one night. She had gotten annoyed by his growling and had just shoved his shoulder forcefully to roll him on his side and quiet the sound of his steady log sawing. The idea came fully formed into her brain at that moment with a jolt of adrenaline. She left him and bolted to her lab.
Like all her solutions it was simple. She began adding more pathways to her device. She managed to build an add-on to the engine that generated a second small field around the first. Essentially she had tucked the first envelope into a second envelope. When that worked she added several more of the add-ons that allowed the nesting of multiple Alcubierre bubbles. Like Matryoshka dolls each packet froze another inside it and another inside that as they formed. As they were expelled the outermost flew out to its maximum range. Then the outer layer disintegrated, chewed to pieces by impacts with random particles of atomic matter. Once the outer layer went though it allowed the next packet held in stasis inside that one to proceed on its way out to its maximum range too. Multiple packets nested in this way allowed her to repeat the process again and again. Woo’s equipment was rather crude, but she was ultimately able to lever in 23 packets before she ran out of time and parts on hand. It gave the thing a range of 160,000,000 kilometers more or less. Well beyond the distance to the sun from earth. This final calculated distance made little sense based on her single packet distance measurements, but she waved the oddity away. With little time to investigate in more detail she assumed there was a cumulative strengthening of fields that came about from nesting them. It was enough for her that the result was just what she needed. Woo secretly called it the Woo Wow factor because the alliteration made her smile. She’d self taught herself to leverage the Petrovski effect at the quantum level. Not bad mechanical advantage for a girl squatting in a cave on a shoestring and a whim. Give her time, money and more equipment and she figured she could go much further.
It was time to take her show on the road. She still had problems. For example how to target so many little packets over vast distance. Also, what would a full scale receiver look like? She was not worried. This was a TESS hallmark. Inventing a new technology, not understanding all its limitations and then exceeding its abilities with sweat equity and determination.
She cornered Maureen in the ladies room during one of the Rear Admiral’s short trips to the planet for a little girl talk.
Bo Hú regarded Zeng with a jaundiced eye. He had come to know his science advisor well over the last three years as he built his political movement. Zeng’s primary function was to make science support politics. Specifically Hú’s politics. Zeng melded science or pseudo-science to support whatever Hú said. Hú was serious about being backed up by ‘science.’ There was a similar team working the same direction with religion, but Hú tended to discount its results. Any Hú religion tended to have some minor benefit with certain sheep-like individuals, but offered no really tangible results that Hú could leverage in the here and now. Science on the other had was more practical and might actually be able to be harnessed to the Hú wagon to produce solid results.
Zeng’s task actually required a highly creative imagination, tailoring scientific ideas to fit ideology—but is did not make him a strategic thinker on any level. That was Hú’s function. It therefore astonished him when at today’s meeting Hú had been pounding on the table, lamenting the inordinate amount of time it was taking to make a reasonable start on catching up to TESS’ McMoran engine technology when Zeng pointed out rather casually that it might just be easier if they lie in wait in orbit and intercept a TESS ship there. He had suggested that if they surprised a TESS ship successfully they could kill or immobilize the crew and then it would allow them to take all the pictures they wanted and study the drive mechanisms at close hand—shaving years off other, more clandestine means of developing a drive. He was careful to note that TESS has already clearly stated places their ships would be according to their service schedules to the nations who paid them.
It was as if Hú’s pet cockatoo had suddenly come up with a radical solution to curing hair loss or cancer. It was utterly astonishing. Yet it was so obvious that he was surprised no one had ever thought of it before.
It was a call to direct action that appealed to Hú tremendously just now.
Hú had recently been made Vice Premier of the State council, essentially the ruling body of China. He also held a State Counselor position in the same council and in addition he was temporarily filling the role of Defense Minister while they waited for a full-time appointee. Hú planned that there would never be such an appointee. His acting command meant he was nominal head of the People’s Liberation Army. He controlled three more Ministerial positions indirectly through his ardent followers as well as two more State Counselor positions through his Militia surrogates. As a measure of power it was good, but not enough. It was never going to be enough of course, but being delusional he was not much given to introspection of that kind. He was far along in his planning and was currently positioning more followers to consolidate a hold on two more ministries he coveted. Of particular interest was that one of them was poised to control the police forces under the Ministry of Public Security, a department that was already riddled with his people. Long term he also had his eye on the Ministry of State Security and its intelligence assets. He hoped to have control of that through yet another proxy within a year and a half. He was getting older though and his impatience was growing with age. He did not plan to wait the full year or more for State Security to fall into his control. Once he had the police fully in his camp politically he would begin to threaten to take over the Premier’s position itself—either at the next election by the Congress or the one after that. It was all part of his proactive steps to move himself into full leadership of China. His use of direct political action had got him this far and emboldened him. His personal self image was approaching arrogance.