by Exurb1a
The empire fessed up to the scandal at last.
Dannika had in fact been colonised centuries earlier, mostly by miners from Aerth and Luna—a few Mars folk too. They were hardened workers, used to awful conditions, and they dug tirelessly. Unfortunately they also drank tirelessly and fought tirelessly and the planet allegedly became a hotbed of late night murder over cards.
The empire was going through its more militaristic phase back then, and responded by sending Marquis Guards to the orb, stationed at each mine and in each town. Under the Marquis' direct orders, they were to execute anyone even mentioning violence, let alone enacting it.
All was well for a year or so, with the folk subdued and working.
An uprising was quietly building however, and the uprising uprose, slaughtering hundreds of the Marquis Guards—no small feat considering the guards themselves were trained at Fort Ridiny, the foremost battle college in the empire.
The next response from the empire was to send several thousand more Marquis Guards, some of them battle elites, and park three warclass voidships in orbit.
Not much information remains of the ensuing battle. All that can be said for sure is the second wave of Marquis Guards were slaughtered and the voidships responded by washing the entire planet's surface in some kind of nerve agent.
Safe to say that ended the conflict.
When wars are spread over thousands of light-years, it's not so difficult to cover the thing up. Maybe a few boastful soldiers will tell the tale in a bar on returning, but soldiers say all sorts.
The story was kept hush. The orb's name was changed. The bodies were buried. The planet was repopulated with new, willing miners, but archaeologists thrown in to soften the culture. (The promise of extraterr remains is enough to tempt even the least ambitious archaeologists.) No one need be any the wiser.
Well, Dannika grew wiser. A massacre is a tough thing to cover up, especially when you send folk to said planet whose sole occupation is digging.
Watching Dimitrova storm out of the emergency room I felt no sense of guilt at having pushed her. The empire would cover the Vasily incident up, cover their intentions, cover their asses as always.
Let’s lengthen this indulgent interlude, if you don’t mind.
Currently we are a united group of planets separated by a common government.
That government uses technological magic to enforce a draconian agenda.
All ages sported magic to enforce the will of the willful. The cavemen used sticks and stones. Our Aerth ancestors used atomic bombs, or the threat of.
Our age uses quiet chambers.
I will explain interstell communication as best as I understand it.
We all know ancient Albuurt Inestine's rules regarding the speed of light—nothing may outrun it. We also know now that this isn't really a limit for light, but for causation. Nothing may be caused faster than around 300,000,000 metres per second. The universe is fastidious like that.
Still, centuries ago, a new science sprang up: 'causation mechanics' it was called back then, though we know it now as just causations. The field sought methods of undoing or subverting causation in an attempt to secure that holy grail, travel beyond the limit of the mischievous photon.
The mathematics was clear though, the three-dimensional limits imposed on us by nature forbade all ships, however clever, from doing such a thing.
Not information though.
It was possible, using a special device called a 'quiet chamber' to transmit simple but coherent messages from one point in space to another instantaneously, relatively speaking.
Inside the chamber was placed a specially 'decohered Hare particle': usually a positron. The chamber would then be expanded and partitioned off into a second chamber. Both chambers were then sealed off from normal spacetime in any meaningful sense so that no matter or radiation could leave or enter. I believe this was done using Higgsian mass distorters or something of the sort. This meant the particle was now existing in a state of superposition between both chambers.
The tricked worked thus: as long as the chambers had no outside contact with the universe in any causal sense, they could be separated by any distance and still maintain simultaneity; the particle existing in both chambers at once. We have the hypergeometrists to thank for this—most notably, ancient Dr. Polly Hare. Distance appears to only apply when the universe knows She is being watched.
One chamber would be placed on Aerth, for example, the other on Minnith. Someone need only collapse the particle on their end to send a message to the second chamber.
Of course, a single particle is barely enough to transmit information. In most cases only a 1 or a 0 can be decoded. For this reason, after the initial particle has been ‘collapsed’, it is re-decohered into a wave state again, with the process beginning over and over.
As far as the universe is concerned, at that point the chamber could be anywhere in space, the contents anyway. It maintains no relationship to anything outside, living or dead.
There is a catch, unfortunately.
Radetsky's Law states that the cosmos doesn't work under standard time dependency. That is, time is something humans may find comforting, and do indeed have to exist in, but is entirely irrelevant as far as the universe is concerned.
This became doubly obvious when the mathematics for the quiet chambers was perfected, but the damn things wouldn't seem to work.
Some bright spark eventually worked out that if at any point in the future the chamber that had sent the message was opened and the causal disconnect broken, the chamber wouldn't allow the message to be sent in the first place. It had to be causally disconnected right up until the heat death of the universe, otherwise no phone calls.
What to do then?
Well, first you'll need a material that can survive up until the death of time itself. Luckily such a thing existed, solid plasma.
Next you would need to be sure the chamber wouldn't be opened by some barbarian in the distant future. Otherwise, again, no phone calls.
A branch of the Marquis' voidfleet was tasked with hiding used quiet chambers across the galaxy, far from prying eyes, so they might never be interfered with.
Sometimes a message won't transmit. Short of equipment failure, the only conceivable answer is that somewhere, at some point in the future, someone will open the chamber, meaning the message cannot be sent in the first place.
Temporal physics is a curious thing.
Not to mention quite expensive.
What it does do, however, is make running a galactic empire possible. Were instantaneous communication beyond science, any planet could do as they please, revolt at will. I suppose they could just do it anyway, but the penalty for such a thing is death for the entire population. By the time a voidfleet arrives, three generations will have passed. Still, most humans are willing to contain their behaviour and revolutionary inclinations for the sake of their great grandchildren.
Now, where were we?
Yes, with Dimitrova storming out the door of the operating room.
Many years have passed since that day. I’ve thought the thing over from a fair few angles. Why did Dimitrova tell me all of that? Surely my threat didn't really have her backed into a corner.
I believe she was tired and guilty. I have seen it in the faces of many empire officials of late. The empire is old already, wearing thin at the edges of its influence. Great unkindness is now necessary to preserve the state of things. Great unkindness warrants someone to action that unkindness. That must take its toll. It seemed to have on Dimitrova.
The empire never visited me again.
I spent eleven more years on Ertia before my health began to deteriorate. Doctors urged me to consider the gerontological drugs but no thanks.
I had a great, great (great, great, great?) niece. I decided it would be a fine thing to visit her before the best of my last years were gone.
By then those horrendous contraptions, topologs, had entered mainstream use and it was
possible to throw one's essence from one side of the galaxy to the other. I knew plenty of doctors who regarded the process as glorified suicide. I didn't understand the technology, didn't care to.
You enter the facility, are made to wear a patient's gown, then put to sleep. You wake up millions of light-years from where you started, only a few days having passed. It is best not to think about what has happened in the space between. (The word reconstruction has become a dirty one in most areas of public life.)
I knew I had arrived on Aerth by the smell of the air. It was not smoggy, but hardly clean either.
Old. Yes, old. It tasted like ancient wars and empire.
They offered me a few days stay in the reception centre to recuperate but I felt my time was limited and I pressed out into the city. It was large, on one of the south continents. I caught a flyer over the ocean to some other continent, I forget the name; there are so many these days. I’d acquired the address of my niece, Eda, from a black-market citizen directory.
I caught another flyer bound for her town. We flew over slums and high-rises, yurts and neon sprawl. If there had been some cultural sense to Aerth once, now it was gone. All continents appeared almost identical in their general architecture, no single dominating aesthetic. In whichever direction one looked it was possible to catch sight of billowing chimneys on the horizon, turning the evening orange.
The folk? They were all mostly modified, implants in their faces, technology clearly visible in their eyes, often staring off with distant looks and consulting inwardly with who I don't know and what I don't know. They treated me fairly and politely, but there was constantly the quiet presence of a judgement there. I have no implants, and from my demeanour it was clear I'd refused ageing treatments. This made me a dinosaur.
The flyer came down on the edge of Eda's town, a dusty spot called Winchester. The architecture was ancient and the people were just as alien as the rest of the Aerthian population.
I bought a coffee from an automag and wandered about a while.
Street performers played instruments I didn't recognise, tunes I couldn't follow. Someone was preaching about artie rights, whatever they were.
Floating images wandered through the streets asking in Galactic Standard if anyone required help.
“Yes,” I said to one and showed it the address.
“This way please.”
We boarded a single carriage train that levitated by some miraculous force a few feet off the ground. Then it was several minute's journey through fields, and finally to an ancient house built of stone with cows and horses and chickens scattered about the place. My little floating navigator politely took its leave.
There was a middle-aged man throwing fish food into a pond. He didn't seem to have any implants. He addressed me in some strange and soft-vowelled tongue.
“I'm sorry, Galactic Standard perhaps?”
He switched, though clumsily. “What with can I help?” he said.
I told him who I was here for. I told him who I was. I told him I’d lived on Aerth before, but everything was strange now.
He considered the thing a minute, then went into the house.
I looked about at the grounds. It was a quiet place to live, serene even; like my cottage back on Ertia, but with a sense of history about it.
A woman in her fifties appeared at the door, also apparently without implants.
She had a floating dust-image in front of her. From the opposite side I could see it was my face. She was comparing me to it. Satisfied, she collapsed the thing.
“Hi,” she said and kept a polite distance.
“Hello.”
Fish came to the surface of the pond and took little nibbles. The horses munched their grass.
“I found out I had some family,” I said, not sure where to go with all this. “I thought I should visit them.”
A little girl appeared in the doorway, poking her head out.
“That's Ansra,” Eda said. “My daughter.”
“Just the one child?”
Eda nodded. “We might have some more, but the world's full enough as it is.” Her Galactic Standard was perfect.
“That's true,” I said. There was nothing else to add. This women was as much a stranger as any other, blood or not. “It was good to finally meet you. I won't take up more of your time.” Meaning what I said, I turned about.
She said, “Won't you stay for dinner at least? There's more than enough to go around.”
“You're sure?” I said.
Something changed in her face. There was a warmth there, some faint recognition of kinship. She nodded.
We ate outside with Eda's husband tending to the child while Eda and I talked quietly at the end of the table. The food was too salty for my taste, but Eda assured me this was authentic Aerthian cuisine these days.
Eda had been an empire mathematician of some kind. She tried explaining her speciality but it all went right over my head; something vaguely related to quiet chamber technology and causations. She had left the empire science division to start a family with her husband, and didn't intend to return to mathematics. They liked it here, the three of them. I could see why.
Her husband brought wine out and after several glasses I started to toy with the idea of bringing up the artifact incident.
In the end it was her who raised it, not me. In passing she mentioned certain advances made from the Ertian event, and was I there during the disaster?
A flash of madness and I told her everything, the explosion, the boarding party, Dimitrova and the scalpel.
She was very quiet. Her husband had been listening too and he kept his eyes on his wife, waiting to see what she'd say.
“Do you know what came of all that?” Eda said. I shook my head. She glanced at her husband. “The news got out a few years ago after a leak at the science division on Rosance. Some inner-circle scientist determined we probably weren't supposed to be able to catch the sphere, not yet anyway. We don't have anything that can travel fast enough. We got lucky. Or unlucky, depending on your perspective. Plus, the man you met was covered in nanoparticles, holographic ones. They contained information, but it took a while to decode. In the end they worked out it was written in three-dimensional binary. It was a dictionary.”
“A dictionary of what?”
She glanced at her husband again. Then she activated a dust-image cloud and pushed it towards me.
Forty or so definitions stretched the length of the screen, with citations and little update reports about which division of the empire was working on which:
Ekeminen: The maximum energy threshold of a system relative to its size. Passing this threshold will result in spontaneous singularity production.
Tantrition: The act of satisfying cosmic causation conditions to ensure travel beyond the light-barrier is possible.
Retrounification: The process of using gravitic pulse eddies to send information along a closed timelike curve.
They weren't all scientific either:
Strong Voluntarism: The political practice of setting up a self-governing society without need of politicians. To satisfy stability conditions, it must be made clear to the entire population that if the system fails, they will all lose their lives instantaneously.
Unitocracy: The political practice of governing as though multiple parties can be democratically elected, while ruling from behind each of them. Excellent for averting revolution.
Hopecraft: Directing the mind towards future goals in an attempt to rebalance psychological normalcy in accordance with Darwinian circuitry.
Psychistry: The dissolution of the mind-body divide using fifth-dimensional topologies to account for subjective experience mapping onto neurological data.
“What is this?” I said.
Eda shrugged. “They think it's some kind of teaching device. Why explain everything when you can just introduce new concepts pointing the way?”
I left it a while, then I said, “Who is pointing the way?”
&nb
sp; “No one knows,” Eda's husband said.
Eda refilled my glass and I read through the rest of the definitions. They were medical, spiritual, philosophical, scientific, and a few other categories more difficult to define. If it was a hoax, it was a clever one. Whatever the result, I was certain it wouldn't be solved in my lifetime.
“You said the thing was in binary?” I said. Eda nodded. “Doesn’t that seem a bit human?”
She said, “Sure it does. Not from this age though.”
I said, “Which age then?”
She said nothing, just smiled politely.
Eda's husband took the child in to bed. Eda waited until everything was quiet, then said, “There's a phrase in Anglish, our tongue. It's sleeping beauty. That's what we call what you did, whiling away your years in longsleep, leaving your wife.” I didn't try to hide my shame. “I don't want to berate you, but everyone here can see your lifetime information whenever they like. All of them will know what you did. If they're strange with you, that might be why.”
“Because I went to Ertia?”
“Because you ran away from your problems. If you weren't a military person or a scientist or a colonist, then chances are you did it to get away. There's a lot of stigma about that on Aerth still, lots of parents disowning children, lots of spouses disowning spouses. I'm not judging you, I just want you to be aware.”
I thought of my ex-wife. Yes, it had been stupid. Yes, I had been spineless.
“I can take the shame. I'm old,” I said.
She dropped the matter. Together we looked through the list of definitions again.
“And what have they done now? With the dictionary, I mean?” I said.
“Some clever folk are using it to build new tech. Trying at least. Maybe one day they'll crack transmitting messages along the timeline and use it to send the dictionary itself back. A loop in a loop in a loop…”
“God, times are strange these days,” I said.
We listened to the garden. I finished my wine.
Eda said, “Did you look your wife up?”