The Quantum Connection (39 page)

Our plan was to spread out and build up as big an empire as we possibly could so we could have a better chance at defending ourselves if the aliens came. We all knew that one day soon they would come. Be prepared! Since each new outpost might be vulnerable, we made sure there was always at least one contingent of
Phoenix
-class ships and SuperAgent-carrying warp-armored soldiers.

We had hoped the ship full of dead aliens we returned to them would give them the hint to not come back and that we were a species they didn't want to mess with. But we soon found that they had not forgotten about us.

Perhaps they had been investigating and studying the ship that we had returned to them to determine how we had beaten them so easily, but I don't think they figured it out. But this time they were very serious and sent a fleet of not a thousand vessels but one hundred thousand vessels. We again detected their approach long before they ever reached the quarantined zone. Since they never figured out how to keep us out of the alien Framework that they had laid in place on top of the universal Infrastructure, we could monitor their whereabouts fairly easily. It seemed obvious that we were much more suited for warfare than the Grays--they just weren't being devious and clever enough and we had had millennia of being forced into warfare due to the Lumpeyin Himbroozya picophage. We were good at warfare when we needed to be and Opolawn's prodding us along hadn't hurt us in that regards. Perhaps a hive collective works in such a way that their response is too sluggish to be good at warfare, I don't know for sure. I just know that we were better, smarter, and we kicked their little Gray asses.

The alien attack force was much more overwhelming this time, so we had to use a combination of the quantum teleportation and plain old space warfare ship-to-ship fighting, but we beat the socks off of them again because we could zip in and out of any of their spaceships. In the past five years of preparation for an alien attack fleet we had produced many more SuperAgents and drafted many more worthy Slash-and-Burn operatives, and we had also captured a lot more alien ships. Since we had never left a survivor in previous conflicts with the Grays they still didn't know how we were getting around within their fleet, and they were helpless. We zipped in and out of their fleet vessels like untouchable gods with unimaginable powers.

We saw them coming and hit them way out before they reached the old quarantine zone. This battle went slower just due to the size of it, but it never once turned against us. We knew what needed to be done and we set about doing it. While conducting the ship-to-ship fighting we discovered that enough squeeze-play warp missiles could force the alien degenerate-matter-hull spaceships into small black holes and that the subsequently formed singularities were unstable and soon went supernova. This actually had a positive effect on the tide of the battle. Once we found out what would happen, we forced a squeeze play in the middle of their fleet. The alien ship shrunk inward on itself until it became a singularity for a few seconds. The singularity's event horizon was small, but it did poke a neat hole clean through the next ship in its path. And then the thing went supernova and splattered ten of the ships around it and disrupted the fleet's formation. We did this repeatedly and in a well-orchestrated manner and the technique worked tremendously well in creating chaos in the alien tactics. We had learned a considerable amount about space warfare and tactics over the past five or so years and it was showing. We had fun with that weapon.

Tatiana and I stayed on board the
Phoenix
this go around, but according to the combat teams, the ship-to-ship fighting was nowhere near as much of a thrill as popping inside an alien ship and completely taking the Grays by surprise and in a matter of seconds, the ship completely from them. Our standard mode of operation was still to leave no Grays standing, sitting, or breathing. We couldn't risk the possibility that one of the witness Grays would figure out how we got on board their ships. Although we believed and still do believe that to be unlikely, as there is no way that they could actually see us and detect what we were doing at such a small scale once we shrunk down and entered the SuperAgent Infrastructure's quantum connection.

This time it took our fleet of thirty-three hundred and nine vessels and our warp-armored SuperAgent-toting infantry two hours and twenty minutes or so to completely halt the alien fleet's advance and another thirty minutes or so making sure that there were no alien survivors left. We discovered that about fifty percent of the alien fleet carried Prawmitoos's FUER and we guessed that was with hopes of igniting the Earth and blowing us asunder. Now we have the FUER and will soon be able to reverse engineer it. Like I said before, the Grays are stupid and not very good at warfare. Or again, perhaps, we are just really good at it.

After the battle had ceased we sent them a hundred ships full of dead Grays and on each of the vessels we used the nanomachines to inscribe in bold, shiny letters the Teytoonise version of the sign at the gates of Hades: abandon all hope ye who enter here! We've been fighting the war against the aliens, Grays and Lumpeyins, on more than just one front. We've also been studying the dormant picophage. Since we had let the general public know that these civilizations existed, sooner or later they would want to communicate with these folks and we hoped to be able to communicate with them safely. With our near-infinite budget from the rare commodities and the other classified endeavors that the nanomachines enabled us to create, we ramped up a huge research effort on the picophage cure--not just for the quarantined aliens but for us as well. Anson developed a means of monitoring the phage devices on the picometer scale and mapping their whereabouts. There were some suggestions on the table presently about being able to capture the individual picophages with the same type of warp bubbles that we use to traverse the Infrastructure. These bubbles are much smaller than the picophage is and if we could drive through and into a quantum connected datastream there was no reason to believe that we couldn't fly around and capture all of these picometer devices. That would happen soon. Then we would have a cure and could go and infect the quarantined races with the cure. We couldn't believe the Grays never thought of this, but then again they used mainly quantum technologies, not general relativistic ones.

If we cured these other civilizations it would put another burden on us, though. At the same time we would also have to protect them from the Grays or they would wipe them out--we believed Opolawn when he told us the Grays believed they were The Species and would devour any others in their path. In the meantime we had every intention of stopping all alien abductions on these worlds and letting them live their lives under their own power. Our plan was to do all of this without letting the local inhabitants ever know we were there. If they call out to us to see if we are here, we planned to answer then, but only then. There have been enough meddlers in this galaxy's history.

CHAPTER 31

Next year we plan to spread the technology of longevity to the species. We have already improved medical technology eons ahead of anything the quacks would have ever come up with. There are no longer any deadly diseases since a dumbed-down version of the nanomachines has been released to the public domain. Nanomachines for specific tasks were introduced into the public as inventions by the brilliant scientist husband-and-wife team Dr. Steven and Dr. Tatiana Montana.

The doctorates weren't honorary. We were able to take courses from Anson and Jim and 'Becca and a few others at the satellite location for the University of America that was located on the Moon and we also had taken many classes at the new University of California at Bakersfield. We both wrote dissertations on nanomachine construction and manipulation.

Of course, now we could build machines nearly twenty orders of magnitude smaller. We were also fairly certain that the Grays couldn't do this. We weren't so sure about the limits of the Lumpeyins. At any rate, the current status of medical technology was such that most people could now expect to live a healthy, happy life to at least a hundred and eighty years.

Next year we plan to introduce to the world that the only reason not to live to be thousands of years old would be if you were hit by a truck--a big and very fast-moving truck that stopped and backed up over you several times--or were squished in an alien collapsing singularity. And it wasn't physicians that developed the cure for old age. Tatiana says I've been hanging around Anson and Jim too much and have adopted their distaste for medical quacks, but Anson and Jim are right and I like them--I can't recall a quack that I ever did. After all, the headshrinkers would've never found that Gray implant in my brain, but they would've sold me all the drugs I could afford until my insurance ran out.

We knew that the ability to live forever would really shock the world and excite it and force it to start thinking about colonizing other worlds or we would run out of room on Earth. We had that part of it covered. There were thousands of outpost worlds in need of settlers. The human race was really growing up and we were also becoming a dominant force to be reckoned with in our part of the galaxy. I hoped we weren't getting too big for our britches.

And were we getting too big for our britches? Because a war between alien species forced one of those races to infect us with the desire to build a war machine, our evolutionary path skewed from what we might have been. The alien that infected us had hopes that our acquired propensity for warfare would one day enable us to develop a means of destroying his enemies. Well, the red bastard got more than he bargained for, didn't he?

Opolawn hadn't counted on some brilliant redneck scientists and astronauts, a Russian bureaucrat's daughter, and a video game repairman from Bakersfield. He hadn't expected that we would develop a means not only of destroying his enemies, but him as well.

As far as my part in this war was concerned, I started out completely alone in the universe after The Rain--which Opolawn had caused in a way. But the W-squared core, Tatiana, and an alien SuperAgent showed me that nobody is really alone and that somehow we are all physically connected to each other.

I'm not real sure about the philosophical ramifications of our connectedness with the universe, but practically it means that the human race is now a formidable species and that if any of you aliens out there think you want to come and mess with us then you had better think twice. We might just make a quick quantum connection to you and lower one hell of a boom on your ass!

AFTERWORD

Well, here we are at the end of my second book and although I didn't want to make it a habit of putting afterwords in my books it looks like I'll put one here anyway. Actually, a colleague of mine, Dr. T. Conley Powell (an expert astrodynamicist and physicist) read the manuscript before I sent it off to Jim Baen.

"You have a lot of very cutting-edge physics in this one," he told me. "And if you don't want folks thinking you just made a lot of it up and that it is not fantasy, perhaps an Afterword is pertinent."

We discussed this a bit and after a while I decided that Conley was probably right. But here is what I want to do. Rather than spending pages here explaining the modern theories of quantum connectedness and the universal quantum consciousness and quantum teleportation and computer Agents and so on and on, I will merely say here that these things are at the state of the art of technology today and I will suggest how you can find more information on these topics.

One of the main characters in this book is a computer Agent. Well, actually it is an evolved next level and alien SuperAgent. At first read one might not understand the true implications of what a computer Agent is. If you have seen
The Matrix
then you are familiar with Agent Smith and his band of black-suited agents. Agent Smith is an example of a computer subroutine with some sort of artificial intelligence algorithm that is designed to carry out particular decision-making functions. With things like fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and artificial neural networks it is quite possible that Agent codes could become as aware as Agent Smith or as my SuperAgent in this story. You may not realize this but you have probably used something similar to a dumb Agent everytime you use an internet search engine. There is all sorts of information on this topic on the web and in books. Go to your favorite library, search engine, or online bookstore and search for "computer agents" and you will find more than you can read in a lifetime.

Another major technology in the story is that of nanomachines. We have all most likely heard of these and seen them in books and television programs. However, I think that a lot of writers miss the really and truly most amazing aspect of this technology and that is that it will create the next evolutionary step for mankind. With real nanomachines there will no longer be fear of injuries and diseases and old age. Physicians as we know them and medicine as it is today will become an archaic thing of our past. Search "nanotechnology" and "nanomachines" for this. Oh, and I'm not certain that I have ever heard of anybody proposing machines on the order of 1x10
meters as was discussed here, but the Alcubierre warp technology would allow for it.

Since I covered the warp theory in my first book,
Warp Speed,
I will not go into it other than to say, "If you didn't read that one first you should check it out." Search "warp theory" and "Alcubierre" for this.

The major theme of this book is the
quantum connection
.
Quantum connectedness
is a well-observed phenomenon, although its applicability to things such as teleportation and time travel and the like are presently the topic of much debate. However, the papers mentioned in the story are real and experiments have been conducted that have teleported photons across a laboratory. And it shouldn't be too long before more complicated things are teleported. This teleportation does occur at the speed of light, as mentioned within this story, and this is why we needed to discuss something greater for the information to travel upon--the universal quantum consciousness. Really, I am not making this stuff up! There have been several papers out about the possibility that everything within the universe is
quantum connected
with everything else and even the universe itself. This is a very abstract concept but there is some experimental basis for parts of it. Go search things like "quantum connectedness," "quantum consciousness," "Bell's inequality," "EPR--Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen experiment," "quantum teleportation," and "quantum entanglement."