Spin State - Chris Moriarty [75]
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.