Spin 01 - Spin State (22 page)

Whatever he said next, Li didn’t hear it. She was already running, scrambling down the steep slope, tearing the cloth of her uniform and the skin of her palms on the sharp rocks.

She ran blind, her internals a wash of useless static. She stumbled over something in the dark, patted it until she recognized the angles of her Davy lamp. It had gone out. She lit it by feel with trembling fingers, strapped it on, and just sat staring at the walls for thirty seconds.

McCuen was waiting in the gangway, looking far better than he had the last time she’d seen him. “You okay?” he asked.

Li remembered her torn hands and clothes, wondered what her face looked like. “I’m fine. I just fell, that’s all.”

He gave her a strange look. “Did you talk to him?”

“Couldn’t get up there. No air.” She pulled on her rebreather, jammed the mouthpiece between her lips, glad of how it masked and muffled her voice. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Sharifi’s hand was warm
, her handshake firm and professional. “Major,” she said, smiling. “Welcome.”

“Nice to meet you,” Li said, wondering what corporate database McCuen had hacked to find this goldmine.

She looked around, gaping unabashedly. They stood in an interactive set designer’s dream of a physics lab: high ceilings, clean Ring-side sunlight streaming through two-story-tall faux-steel casement windows, cutting-edge lab equipment carefully arranged to produce an effect of frenzied but impeccably organized activity.

She turned back to Sharifi, who was still talking at her. She was charismatic, in a hard-sciency kind of way. She came across as thoughtful, rational, feminine. And obviously—very obviously—a genetic. A youthful, vigorous fiftysomething. Shorter than UN norm. Thick black hair framing a square, flat-boned Han face. Not fat, but compact, solid.

Li knew that body. She knew the heft of the long thighbones, the sharp ridge of the nose, the smooth curve of skull from ear to temple.
So that’s what I would have looked like
, she thought and shuddered.

“Let’s start with a quick overview,” Sharifi said.

As she spoke, Li felt the fund-raising program’s enslaved AI trying to crack her system. Fishing for financial data, donation patterns, anything that would help narrow its sales pitch. Her own AI moved to counter the probes, and she gave it permission to open a set of decoy personal files.

A holodisplay unrolled beside Sharifi. She drew a finger through the grid to activate it, pulling a sparkling wake of ripples behind her. The display sprang to life, and Li found herself staring at one of the iconic images of the age: a simplified-for-laymen flowchart of the Bose-Einstein teleportation process.

Sharifi smiled, flashing straight, well-cared-for teeth. “Quantum-teleportation—or, more accurately, quantum-corrected spinstream replication—has been described as the worst system of faster-than-light travel, except for all the others. A more accurate way of putting it might be to say that QCSR unites two fatally flawed methods of transport in order to capitalize on their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.

“Wide-band spinfoam broadcasting of spin-encoded binary messages gives us robust superluminal transport—but only in the chaotic context of transient wormholes, where data transfer is inaccurate, unreliable and, worst of all for corporate and governmental purposes, unprivate.

“In essence, broadcasting data through the quantum foam is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean. The odds that it will reach someone somewhere are good—and they get better the more bottles you can afford to send. But the odds that your message will reach a single intended recipient—and that it will be legible and private when it does reach them—are low.

“Bose-Einstein teleportation, by contrast, establishes reliable, securely encrypted data transmission between any two parties that share a pair of entangled condensates. By uniting Bose-Einstein teleportation and spinfoam broadcasts, we achieve the sine qua non of the interstellar information economy: private, superluminal transmission that is robust, reliable, and secure enough for us to entrust the most valuable and fragile cargo to it: human cargo.”

A map of UN space replaced the teleportation schematic. Colored points spread in an expanding ring around Sol, showing all the known and suspected human-settled worlds.

United Nations–blue highlighted the UN member states and Trusteeships. A red slash along one flank of the UN territory showed the eight Syndicate systems. Independent colonies shone green. Beyond the Periphery, white dots signified the far-flung settlements with which the UN had lost contact during the long centuries of Earth’s dying.

As Li watched, a wagon-spoke pattern of brightly colored nodes and lines spread across the star map.

“This,” Sharifi said, “is the current Bose-Einstein relay network. The smaller nodes represent data relays. The larger ones—and there are far fewer of those—are personnel and cargo relays. Each node, underneath all the specialized technology, is a simple array of Bose-Einstein condensates, entangled with companion condensates at every other receiving station on the UN’s Bose-Einstein relay system. In essence, each Bose-Einstein relay is a glorified quantum-teleportation transmitter, linked only to the receivers that share communications or transport-grade entanglement. As long as we maintain entanglement between relay stations—by shipping freshly entangled crystals from relay to relay at sublight speeds—the network functions, and we can use QCSR to achieve arbitrarily accurate superluminal replication.

“But there’s a problem,” Sharifi said, tracing the wheel-shaped pattern of the network, lighting up the radiating spokes with digital fireworks. “The system only works as long as we can maintain our banks of pure entanglement at the relay stations. Streamspace, the spinstream, the whole interstellar ecopolitical infrastructure depends on Compson’s World’s ability to keep supplying live Bose-Einstein condensates. And Bose-Einstein condensates are a nonrenewable resource. A nonrenewable resource that we are fast exhausting.”

Sharifi turned away from the display to pace a short circuit along the tile floor of the laboratory. As if in response to the muted echo of her footsteps, the map gave way to a long-distance probe image of a planet half-cloaked in night. Li took in the blood-and-rust hue of the landmasses, the cloudlike swirls of algae bloom on the northern steppes, the primitive geometry of tailings piles big enough to be seen from high orbit. Compson’s World.

“Coal. Oil. Uranium. Water. This is not the first time humanity has depended on a nonrenewable resource. And, as past ages have discovered, there are only two ways out of this dependence. Either you learn to do without the nonrenewable resource—or you learn to make more of it.”

Gradually, so gradually that it seemed to be no more than the rising of Compson’s World’s distant sun, a pair of Bose-Einstein crystals took shape on the screen, superimposed on the brooding image of the planet.

“So,” Sharifi said, turning away from the screen again. “How do we make more of it? And what, if we can allow ourselves to dream a little, would UN space look like with a cheap, unlimited supply of artificial condensate?”

The holodisplay rippled, shifting through the color spectrum. Suddenly Li was in the middle of it. New transmission lines formed around her, zipping through empty air, linking previously isolated relays, stringing a thick, star-bright spider’s web through and beyond UN space. The web pulsed, grew solid, wove itself into a single, bright veil that shimmered over the whole expanse of the human worlds.

“No unequal distribution of transport technology,” Sharifi said. “No information ghettos. No technological backwaters. Just a single entanglement field linking all UN space—and eventually all human space. A metalink, if you will, that provides direct, economical, one-shot superluminal replication from any point in UN space to every other point.”

The holo shifted again, this time to realtime footage of suspiciously clean-looking Bose-Einstein miners working at an underground cutting face.

“All we need,” Sharifi said, “is the technology to culture Bose-Einstein condensates and format them to our specifications in a laboratory setting.”

Now Sharifi began the sales pitch in earnest. The feed of the cutting face gave way to images of condensates being assayed, cut, polished, and formatted. And, finally, to the finished product: cleaned, cut, paired, and formatted communications-grade Bose-Einstein condensate. “Of course, in order to culture condensates,” she said, “we must understand them. And the key to understanding lies not in our future, but in our past.”

A glowing image of Earth appeared on the holodisplay. The image swelled as the display zoomed in on blue ocean. Sharifi looked at Li, smiled, and stepped into the screen.

Surf beat around them. Li walked beside Sharifi on a narrow slip of starlit sand between two boundless oceans. Stars shone overhead in a bright, clear sky that no unprotected human being had seen for over two centuries.

“This,” Sharifi said, “is the Great Barrier Reef. It is, or was, the largest single life-form on pre-Migration Earth.”

She walked out into the surf, beckoning for Li to follow, and Li saw that she and Sharifi were both wearing wet suits and diving gear. They dove, passing swiftly though the surf and into the quiet water below. Sharifi brushed by Li on the way down, bare thigh against bare thigh, and Li wondered just how personal this program was designed to get. They came to rest in still, bright water half a dozen meters below the surface. A coral reef ran away like a broad road on either side of them.

It was night; the reef was active. Technicolor fish slipped around and through it. The coral itself waved a million glowing arms below them. As Sharifi guided Li along the great wall of the reef, a realtime story unfolded before them. The coral grew, hunted, colonized new territory. Li saw that the entire reef was a single organism, a single primitive mind.

Then she saw humans come, and with them shipping lanes, motorboats, oil spills, chemical contamination. The reef sickened, shrank, died long before anyone unlocked its secrets or plumbed the immense colonial mind’s inner workings.

The water glowed and shifted. Suddenly Li was floating not in water but in featureless darkness.

“The Great Barrier Reef is gone,” Sharifi said. “Anything we could have learned from it is lost forever. However, when humanity moved out into the galaxy, we discovered another colonial organism. One built on an even larger scale. The Bose-Einstein strata of Compson’s World.”

Light seeped into the world, and Li saw an immense, glassy honeycomb structure stretching around and above her.

“This is what a typical Bose-Einstein deposit would look like if you removed the coal and rock surrounding it,” Sharifi told her. “The condensates draw energy from the surrounding coal. We don’t understand how they function, or how their constituent strata communicate with each other. Nonetheless, each deposit appears to form a single colonial organism. Each Bose-Einstein bed is, in effect, an immense, landlocked coral reef, growing in an ocean of coal and rock.”

The stratum faded, and the lab reappeared around them.

“Bose-Einstein strata are too different from terrestrial carbon-based life for us to draw any direct conclusions,” Sharifi said. “Still, the analogy is a fruitful one. The strata display many of the characteristics of a primitive colonial intelligence. Stimuli pass from one segment of each stratum to other segments. More intriguing, several experiments have established that the condensates pass interstratal as well as intrastratal messages by quantum replication, leading to the supposition that all of Compson’s strata may have originated in a single organism, and that the ability of their component condensate beds to maintain pure entanglement supplies with only minimal decoherence is an evolved survival trait. Whatever the explanation, it is this organism that we need to understand in order to culture live condensate.

“We are now a century into the quantum era, but despite all our advances, we are primitives. We use condensates, but we don’t control them, don’t understand them. In quantum terms, we are little better than prehistoric cave dwellers who nourish a lightning-sparked flame, knowing they lack the power to rekindle it. I am asking you to help us step into a new era—an era in which we will take control of this extraordinary resource, understand it, master it, use it to unite our species as we have not been united since the Evacuation.”

Sharifi moved in to close the sale. She started talking practical applications, patents, proprietary data. She alluded to the potential profits without ever quite putting hard numbers to them. This was sexy science, buffed, polished, and carefully wrapped for consumption by corporate donors.

“Any questions?” Sharifi asked after the wrap-up.

“Yes.” Li kept her voice deliberately flat. “How the hell did you convince the Secretariat to waive the Zahn Act restrictions and clear a genetic to work on this project?”

Sharifi blinked and stiffened, looking genuinely insulted. “Forgive me,” she said coolly. She sounded as if she were working hard to stay polite. “I can’t say that’s a question I expected. We have of course obtained all the necessary TechComm clearances. However, if you have concerns about security issues, I can refer you to the appropriate officials.”

The program was good. Sharifi had laid out the money to get an AI with enough power and personality to sell the simulation. She must have needed big money, and needed it fast. And she’d gotten it, or she’d never have made it to Compson’s in the first place.

What do you think?”
Li asked two hours later, sitting at an outdoor table just off the Calle Mexico.

Cohen shrugged—a shrug that Li felt in the numbers even as she saw it. “I think Sharifi needed money. Badly.”

He had put on a ’face for the meeting that Li imagined he thought was inconspicuous. But of course Cohen’s idea of inconspicuous was a few spins off-norm by most people’s standards, and half the singles in the place had been glancing surreptitiously at their table for the last ten minutes.