Spin State - Chris Moriarty [74]
“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