Why is that? Why do some always get the credit, while others get downgraded? Do I have some special knack, some sign that says, “Undervalue me”? How come, to get back to the matter in hand, that in the history of the Heimdall virtual bridge, I’m the fucking Trotsky?
Not that I’m bitter.
I admit, of course, that the scientific groundwork for Heimdall was laid down by others. I’m not the Einstein, or the Dyson, or the Fermi, or the Lopez. I was, by that time, in my fourth or fifth major change of career, the elected President of Humanity. For nearly a hundred years I was the most powerful person in the Human Universe. I created peace, harmony, understanding.
And Heimdall.
Heimdall is, of course, a quantum artefact. Its essential principles relate to the well established concept that a quantum state in one part of the Universe can affect a quantum state in another part of the Universe, simultaneously and without any passage of time.
Scientists call it – I feel you flagging here but please, bear with me, this is the very structure and essence of the Universe we’re talking about, so if you fail to grasp this paragraph you might as well be, frankly, pond slime, or a laboratory rat – the principle of wholeness, or entanglement. Which means that whenever two systems have at some previous moment interacted (or entangled), their description is tied together no matter how far apart they may subsequently be. And a datum that is true of the one system, will be true of the other system also.
But since all the Universe originated in a single near-infinitesimal singularity – in its pre-Big Bang golden idyll – every part of the Universe was at this very earliest moment entangled with every other part. And that connection persists, despite the subsequent expansion of the Universe. It’s like twins separated at birth and raised in different countries, who remain empathetically or even telepathically connected.
And so quantum theory allows an amazing loophole to the law that says nothing can travel faster than light. The exception says that i nformation can be conveyed instantaneously, whatever the distance involved, if it’s information about a quantum state between two previously entangled quanta.
But to get any value out of this hallowed principle of physics, you have to be able to manipulate the quantum states on both sides. Not by much. You just need the difference between Quantum State A and Quantum State B. Which is the difference between 0 and 1. Which of course is the basis for a long-distance digitised computer connection, capable of communicating information instantaneously.
And so, once you have your two quantum state controllers in place… distances vanish. An email sent in Australia will reach Africa the very instant it is sent. It won’t be quick, it won’t be fast; there won’t even be a millisecond of time elapsing. It will be instant. And so it becomes as easy to send an email from Australia to Africa as it is to send one from London to the other end of the galaxy.
And thus, as a result of these discoveries, the Universal Web becomes possible. Video phone calls can be made between planets, without even a momentary delay. And all this is made possible by the “quantum state manipulation nano-computers” which were christened, by me, Quantum Beacons.
The snag is that there’s a huge amount of work involved in setting up this means of communication. The near Beacon is always on Earth or in the Earth system, but the distant Beacons have to be literally flown through physical space to the desired remote location. In a metaphorical nutshell; the telephone wire has to be hooked up at both ends.
I was, I have to admit, one of the first to realise the great value and potential of all the decades of difficult theorising into the field of quantum communication. And I believe that the construction of Heimdall was the greatest accomplishment of my Presidency, tarnished only by the memory that the scientists and the explorers were given all the credit, whereas my role was… sorry, sorry, I should move on.
To continue:
In order to create Heimdall, a fleet of spacecraft was built. (This was before my time, I concede.) Each ship was massive, and constructed with total redundancy. Nanocomputers were installed to do the work; but every system had a backup, every backup had a backup. And each ship was crewed by five hundred potential space colonists, with a cargo of human sperm and every conceivable seed and animal embryo in deep store.
The first vessel in the fleet was called the Mayflower. Tragically, all five hundred crew members died in deep space, after a collision with a dark-matter tornado. This was a phenomenon we hadn’t even known about until it killed the world’s finest men and women. The names of those five hundred are engraved in a plaque in New York Plaza, and in my heart. And in the history books.
But even though the crew was dead, the computers carried on sailing the spaceship. On and on it went on its long journey. Using state-of-the-art fusion engines, it could reach speeds of almost two-thirds light speed.
After fifty years the Mayflower stopped. Its cargo of human embryos was unfrozen and carefully grown by robot nannies. Seeds were germinated and planted. A Quantum Beacon was built by the pre-programmed robots and nanobots. And, once it was installed, instantaneous messages could be transmitted between the Mayflower in its new home, and Earth.
And after that, vidphone and webcam links were created. Robots were then remotely built in humanoid form, complete with touch and olfactory sub-programs. We could now see everything the robots could see, and feel what they felt, the moment that they saw or felt it. Which means: It’s as if we were there ourselves. Suddenly, space had shrunk… with the help of virtual technology, a citizen of Earth could find him or her self on an alien planet.
This first Quantum Beacon planet orbited a star which I named Asgard, after the home of the Norse Gods. And the virtual link that connected us was called Heimdall, after the Rainbow Bridge that connected Asgard with Earth.
And meanwhile, all the time, other colony ships were landing. Other Beacons were being built. And the map of space was filled with the dots of human settlements…
It took four hundred years for Heimdall to become the masterpiece it now is. Quantum Beacons are dotted across all of known space, and the virtual Rainbow Bridge that is Heimdall allows instant communications between all the regions of humanity.
And, all those years ago, actual control of the first space colonies was literally in my hands, and in my eyes. With the help of a virtual bodysuit connected to robot bodies on the colony planets, I could walk on alien soil. I could move tractors across arid plains. I could choose the music that played on the colony’s intercom, I could devise menus for the children who I was growing there. I could do anything!
My focus in those early years was almost exclusively on the colonists of the Asgard star system. I named their planet Hope, and it became my joy. I studied them, and encouraged them, and help shape their society.
But I was at pains to be sure that the new colonists did not ever become resentful of their “master” in a faraway land. The settlers of Hope were my children, not my slaves. I became the perfect parent; all-seeing, all- protective, indulgent, and immune to insult.
And much to my delight, the new colony of Hope turned into a wild and dangerous place. It was the first civilisation in human history to have only one generation, grown from embryo by robots with unerring care. All the babies were babies together; they all went to kindergarten together; and they all graduated to primary school level together. And then they became teenagers together; they were thirteen together, they were fourteen together, they were fifteen together.
And thus, the children grew into adulthood. Every inhabitant of the new colony had the same birthday, the same emotional and mental age. And, knowing that the Quantum Beacon was a constant source of information and wealth, a virtual safety net, they ran riot together.
For five whole years the colony of Hope was a drug and sex and rock and roll Utopia. No useful work was done. Wild oats were sowed. The “accelerated maturity” process became a joke, as the colonists spent the years between fifteen and twenty either stoned or drunk or delirious with sex.
Well, good luck to them I thought. I myself, I must concede, had the dullest-ever teenagerdom. So, by proxy, I was now sowing my own wild oats. Through vidcam and virtual-reality links, I followed the lives of my children, I watched them get spaced out, I watched them fuck, I watched some of them play suicide games that tragically ended their infinitely promising lives. I watched, but I didn’t meddle. I merely waited until my children grew into maturity.
And then I gave them independence. With independence came power; with power came a sense of responsibility. We still kept, through our robots and virtual-control programs, a grip on the mineral and energy wealth of the new colony. Solar panels orbiting Hope’s sun pulsed energy that fuelled its space factories and telescopes. And spaceships travelling down the Beacon’s path carried valuable raw materials back to Earth on a
