So I write scifi in what little spare time I have. No, I'm not an english major. I haven't taken any creative writing classes or anything, I just enjoy it, and here is an offering for TW to critique/destroy.
This would not be hard science fiction, as I have no education in hard sciences.
Also, the term 'canner' is a colloquial term in my universe which people employed in space travel use to describe themselves. Early ships/stations were modular, with modules being cylindrical, or can shaped. Ergo, cans, canners.
Enjoy!
***
I looked across the small metal table at Jules. He had on one of his slightly sheepish, but extremely superior grins that he gets when he's about to enlighten you on a new mystery of the universe unravelled, but he feels the need to apologize first for his brilliance. He has a cup of coffee. He takes his coffee black, and makes it strong. I look down at my own cup. I'm having chai with two creams and two sugars. It's hard to believe one can be made to feel so inferior inadvertantly, simply on the basis of beverage choice. Yet, here is Jules with the strong coffee and news that demands a pre-emptive apology, and here I am, enjoying my chai and ignorance.
"I'm glad you came. I thought this deserved a personal visit." The unspoken subtext - I deigned to dirty myself in your presence. I'm likely being unfair, but there's something about a terminal overacheiver that puts me on edge. He probably breathes more efficiently too.
I try my best to look non-chalant, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to sit down for coffee with one of the best engineers, working on the biggest and therefore most secretive and prestigious projects. Jules was an engineer of a special variety - he was of the relatively new breed that dealt solely in astronautical engineering. The infrastructure of space. Such a thing seems silly and preposterous, but apparently they just installed an elevator on the moon that carries things down from orbital docking ports. There have been magnetic catapults on Mars for a decade that will throw the mined helium-3 not only into orbit, but back to Earth for use in clean fusion reactors. So I suppose there are things to keep people like him busy.
"So, do I have to guess? Did you find a way to pull heavy metals directly out of asteroids from your back porch, or do we still have to go out and crack them open?"
He laughed a short, barking sort of laugh. I wasn't sure if he appreciated my sarcasm, or was laughing because we were already doing that, and I simply didn't know. Jules grinned wolfishly, eyes glittering.
"What do you know about the speed of light?"
My stomach turned inside out. As a simple canner, I knew all the basics, such as - it was immutable; if you were particularily lucky, you got to do lots of longs hauls at sub-relativistic speeds, and lived to be 140. And that was more or less it. I mean, there's a lot of spatial relations that goes into canning, er, space travel. I'm not an expert, but I know my way around the solar system, and the inside of just about any class of ship that services Solar Prosperity interests.
The thing is, I don't need the speed of light to do anything. Things work well the way they are. Someday we'll stretch space or rip open the universe and hop around at will. Or we won't - but I'm happy not knowing about the great what ifs and why nots that drive minds like Jules'. And I said so.
Jules simply grinned wider, and I hated him a little more.
"What if I told you that we've been thinking all wrong. About the speed of light, that is."
"Well, I certainly wouldn't be surprised if we aren't 100% on all our educated guesses. The thing is, Einstein got a lot right, and some things wrong. And most of the things he got right were about the speed of light. What more is there, other working out the details?"
"Speaking specifically," Jules started, "nothing. Except that the details won't tell us how to subvert an apprently immutable law of reality. So, how do we get around lightspeed, or at least, the limits imposed by it?"
"I don't know that we can - and even if we did it would hardly be beneficial - too slow for true interstellar travel, and too risky to use inside a solar gravity well. We're uniquely placed to benefit in no way from breaking the speed of light."
"Absolutely. You're completely right in that sense. Travelling that fast, in the space available, simply isn't practical or safe. But think of other applications and technologies that could benefit if the law of speed of light were to become....the guideline of the speed of light."
I thought for a moment. Travel certainly wasn't the answer - and that was the number one focus and priority of virtually anyone who thought about moving about beyond Earth's atmosphere. What else was there? Ships communicated via laser beacon, which created practically a real time connection on a regional level. Planetary communication. Planets still had long down times. Even just bouncing a signal into orbit and back, processing time included was a few seconds. Not important, really, but enough to be a nuisance.
"Well," I started slowly, as I built the problem in my head. "We can't really communicate large amounts of data easily between planets. And we do have over a dozen inhabited planetoids in the system - all experiencing various levels of signal deterioration due to the varying amounts of radiation present, not to mention their relation to each other, and especially if the sun or another body is between them. That's why we have the arrays."
I was referring to several dozen colossal communication arrays, orbiting the sun to give the greatest coverage possible for communication. Massively expensive, there were entire industries and millions of people employed keeping them functioning at some level. Now that I thought about it, dedicated interplanetary bandwidth was one the most prized resources among individuals, corporations, and political entities alike. It represented your connection to the rest of humanity, and by inference, your relative importance to the rest of humanity to be trusted with that level of access to the arrays.
"Oh, the arrays." Jules was wistful. That meant he was playing coy, trying to draw out the conversation so that I could demonstrate further how little I knew of his expertise. He was a bastard like that. He made really good cookies though, which shouldn't seem relevant. One can be assured though that the cookies are relevant, especially when cornerstones of your education in physics are being eroded. "I wonder what would happen if we didn't need them. I suppose it would be a disaster. Think of the unemployment, the riots about unemployment."
This was his game. Talk himself into not talking about his discovery. Now it was my task to reaffirm his brilliance, and be rewarded with enlightenment. Egotists can be awfully predictable at times.
"Well," I started. "Given the geopolitical scene at present, something like faster than light communication could create a unique advantage, not only tactically, but strategically as well. And given that while some people can afford array access, some other people can afford access to other people using the array. So it would deny an opponent the opportunity to gather competitive intelligence, while saving you huge sums required for access, and allowing greater access to your opponents own communications network. In our case, the Society for Mutual Benefit would really not benefit a whole lot as they already control access to a large portion of the array network. On the other hand, the Outworlders Bloc would benefit massively. Their chief handicap is the large and constantly varying amount of space between their colonies, and they're all interdependant."
The Society for Mutual Benefit was a high-sounding name for the corporate alliance who previously held control over all helium-3 production in the colonies. As Earth was heavily dependant on this clean fuel, it gave the middle men between the producers and consumers a great amount of power. That is, it would have if no one realized that they didn't need the Society for Mutual Benefit. One day, you had a solar system of happy miners, happily mining, making good money, and living happy lives. The next, you had a few loud ideologues, and angry miners, still making good money, only not living happy lives, because they feel politically disenfranchised. Then you had the Society for Mutual Benefit, and the Outworlder's Bloc. They even named themselves something exclusionary, underlining the point that they were on the outside, and Earth and the money-grubbers were on the in. I mean, for all anyone cares, they could have been the Happy Funtime Gang (subtitle - Who Wants to Take Over the Solar System) and no one would have blinked. The point was, they had the h-3, and Earth didn't.
"So, you're saying that abolishing the arrays would handicap the allied corporate forces, while increasing the relative power of the rebellious colonials?"
"More or less", but with more grinning.
Enough foreplay.
"So, now my attention is thoroughly piqued. I don't think I could get wetter. How exactly can we communicate instantly, with anyone, anywhere?"
"Well, putting it like that, you can't. But you can break the speed of light in terms of the speed at which the message is relayed, but not travels."
That was thoroughly confusing for me. I also said that.
"That's exactly what I mean - we've been thinking about it all wrong - we don't need to send messages through space. If you wanted a letter to be delivered from one place to another, and they happen to be on opposite sides of the solar system, what is the quickest way for the other person to read it?"
"Up until this morning, I thought it would have been laser beacon, through the arrays. What's faster than the speed of light?"
"Nothing, but what if they could literally see the letter you wrote, without transmitting it, as if it was there, right next to them."
"Okay, just so I'm clear on this, we're not talking about remote viewing, right? I know some people can do that, but not enough to make a viable communications network out of it."
More laughter from Jules. He doesn't take abilities seriously that can't be expressed mathematically.
"Not at all, not at all. See, we always thought that this was a science and technology problem, that someone in a labcoat in an R&D dungeon would solve with a bang and a Eureka! As it turns out, it's a philosophical problem. You're familiar with the principle of non-contradiction, yes? I thought so. Canner education isn't everything it's cracked up to be, but it's not bad overall. Anyway, nothing can be and not be, at the same place, at the same time, in the same sense. That's it. So when we send a message it has to travel, because it can't be and not be at the same place at the same time. They can't read it while you're still writing it, from miles away. There's always delay. That sort of nonsense. Well, what if your letter was just really, really big? What if they could read it, as you wrote it, from across the solar system?"
"Well, that would be great, though awkward. Everyone else could read it too."
"And that's what I love about you. So literal, but humorously so. Social etiquette and not worrying about anyone reading over your shoulder aside, what are the practical problems?"
"Well, first off is the fact that the solar system is full of trash that all has its own orbit. I mean, it's not just planets out there. There have to be hundreds of monitoring stations posting near constant traffic updates and course corrections to keep ships out of trouble."
There were over a thousand actually, once I thought about it more. Most were unmanned, but they were networked and supercomputers worked out the rest, posting updates every twenty seconds to every ship in the vacinity.
Jules agreed. "Agreed - but it's possible to plot clear paths, areas within the solar system which are never intersected by a celestial body's orbit."
"If that's our running definion of a clear path in space I'm afraid I may qualify myself. Being serious though, yes. Come to think of it I know of several spaces like that. A few are extremely popular trade lanes for heavy lifters, and two others are exclusive h-3 delivery chutes. You know, for the mag things. The catapults."
Jules leaned back with a sigh and a smile, one eyebrow cocked. "So what if your letter occupied an entire clear path between two planets? Think of it like those old wire telegraphs."
"Wire? As in, those handheld things people talked to each other with? That's a hell of a wire, millions of kilometres long. No, that's impossible. The signal was an electronic pulse, right? It still has travel time. There would be less signal degradation, but you would have to use every scrap of every metal we've ever mined to make that wire."
"We would, that's true. The difference in my system, is that the signal doesn't travel down the wire - the signal IS the wire. Instead of electrical impulses, you do this - " He picked up a stir stick from my tea, and rubbed it between his fingers. It rotated, twirling in the air.
I stared at the stir stick. Suddenly, I knew how my dog back home had felt every time it watched my synthesize it some food. It knew something important was happening, but it didn't understand what. The stick continued to twirl, and I got the distinct impression it was mocking me - even the stir stick and figured it out.
"So...you twist the wire? Holy shit, you twist it? Like...shit. You twist certain degrees for letters or symbols or....shit. That's really simple. The wire would twist itself though, wouldn't it? What about planets? Wouldn't the competing gravitational fields drag it around a fair bit?"
"Basically every material known to human science would twist. So, we looked at basic, elementary particles. Throw compounds out the window all together, same with elements on the periodic tables. You can't build it out of something with mass."
Jules bent over to his right side and retreived a small matte green box from his briefcase. He opened it - it split down the middle into two haves which slid apart on an internal track. Inside were some sundry electronics with a few small blinking lights to indicate that something profoundly scientific was happening in the box. In the middle, was a small fibre. Jules used his stir stick to prod the fibre and it floated out of the box. At the same time he drew a second instrument that was about ten centimetres long and cylindrical, and held it next to the fibre while depressing a small pressure pad at the fore end.
With all seriousness he said "I can't tell you how or what kind of field these devices generate, don't ask. But this - " He raised the cylinder and the fibre moved in accordance "has no mass. It's a monomolecular fibre, that weighs nothing, no matter how much there is of it, and what gravity well it's inside. The fields anchor it, or it would simply pass through us or the table, and stay floating in the exact same spot while the universe moves around it. Anything can pass through it to no effect, and it has no tensile properties, which makes it perfect. With our fields - that was the big discovery, not this fluff, " he said as he released the pressure pad on his cylinder. The fibre disappeared.
I starred at the space where the fibre had been. "Where'd it go? I mean I know where, but it was just.....gone!"
Jules looked at me, leaned to look out the window, and leaned back, frowning. "Well, I think it went through you, and then..."
"Through me, I...well, I think....am I okay?"
With perfect tenderness Jules softened his eyes, and I felt ten years old. "It doesn't weigh anything. What could it do to you?" The grin returned, and his eyes returned to their previous lupine state.
This would not be hard science fiction, as I have no education in hard sciences.
Also, the term 'canner' is a colloquial term in my universe which people employed in space travel use to describe themselves. Early ships/stations were modular, with modules being cylindrical, or can shaped. Ergo, cans, canners.
Enjoy!
***
I looked across the small metal table at Jules. He had on one of his slightly sheepish, but extremely superior grins that he gets when he's about to enlighten you on a new mystery of the universe unravelled, but he feels the need to apologize first for his brilliance. He has a cup of coffee. He takes his coffee black, and makes it strong. I look down at my own cup. I'm having chai with two creams and two sugars. It's hard to believe one can be made to feel so inferior inadvertantly, simply on the basis of beverage choice. Yet, here is Jules with the strong coffee and news that demands a pre-emptive apology, and here I am, enjoying my chai and ignorance.
"I'm glad you came. I thought this deserved a personal visit." The unspoken subtext - I deigned to dirty myself in your presence. I'm likely being unfair, but there's something about a terminal overacheiver that puts me on edge. He probably breathes more efficiently too.
I try my best to look non-chalant, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to sit down for coffee with one of the best engineers, working on the biggest and therefore most secretive and prestigious projects. Jules was an engineer of a special variety - he was of the relatively new breed that dealt solely in astronautical engineering. The infrastructure of space. Such a thing seems silly and preposterous, but apparently they just installed an elevator on the moon that carries things down from orbital docking ports. There have been magnetic catapults on Mars for a decade that will throw the mined helium-3 not only into orbit, but back to Earth for use in clean fusion reactors. So I suppose there are things to keep people like him busy.
"So, do I have to guess? Did you find a way to pull heavy metals directly out of asteroids from your back porch, or do we still have to go out and crack them open?"
He laughed a short, barking sort of laugh. I wasn't sure if he appreciated my sarcasm, or was laughing because we were already doing that, and I simply didn't know. Jules grinned wolfishly, eyes glittering.
"What do you know about the speed of light?"
My stomach turned inside out. As a simple canner, I knew all the basics, such as - it was immutable; if you were particularily lucky, you got to do lots of longs hauls at sub-relativistic speeds, and lived to be 140. And that was more or less it. I mean, there's a lot of spatial relations that goes into canning, er, space travel. I'm not an expert, but I know my way around the solar system, and the inside of just about any class of ship that services Solar Prosperity interests.
The thing is, I don't need the speed of light to do anything. Things work well the way they are. Someday we'll stretch space or rip open the universe and hop around at will. Or we won't - but I'm happy not knowing about the great what ifs and why nots that drive minds like Jules'. And I said so.
Jules simply grinned wider, and I hated him a little more.
"What if I told you that we've been thinking all wrong. About the speed of light, that is."
"Well, I certainly wouldn't be surprised if we aren't 100% on all our educated guesses. The thing is, Einstein got a lot right, and some things wrong. And most of the things he got right were about the speed of light. What more is there, other working out the details?"
"Speaking specifically," Jules started, "nothing. Except that the details won't tell us how to subvert an apprently immutable law of reality. So, how do we get around lightspeed, or at least, the limits imposed by it?"
"I don't know that we can - and even if we did it would hardly be beneficial - too slow for true interstellar travel, and too risky to use inside a solar gravity well. We're uniquely placed to benefit in no way from breaking the speed of light."
"Absolutely. You're completely right in that sense. Travelling that fast, in the space available, simply isn't practical or safe. But think of other applications and technologies that could benefit if the law of speed of light were to become....the guideline of the speed of light."
I thought for a moment. Travel certainly wasn't the answer - and that was the number one focus and priority of virtually anyone who thought about moving about beyond Earth's atmosphere. What else was there? Ships communicated via laser beacon, which created practically a real time connection on a regional level. Planetary communication. Planets still had long down times. Even just bouncing a signal into orbit and back, processing time included was a few seconds. Not important, really, but enough to be a nuisance.
"Well," I started slowly, as I built the problem in my head. "We can't really communicate large amounts of data easily between planets. And we do have over a dozen inhabited planetoids in the system - all experiencing various levels of signal deterioration due to the varying amounts of radiation present, not to mention their relation to each other, and especially if the sun or another body is between them. That's why we have the arrays."
I was referring to several dozen colossal communication arrays, orbiting the sun to give the greatest coverage possible for communication. Massively expensive, there were entire industries and millions of people employed keeping them functioning at some level. Now that I thought about it, dedicated interplanetary bandwidth was one the most prized resources among individuals, corporations, and political entities alike. It represented your connection to the rest of humanity, and by inference, your relative importance to the rest of humanity to be trusted with that level of access to the arrays.
"Oh, the arrays." Jules was wistful. That meant he was playing coy, trying to draw out the conversation so that I could demonstrate further how little I knew of his expertise. He was a bastard like that. He made really good cookies though, which shouldn't seem relevant. One can be assured though that the cookies are relevant, especially when cornerstones of your education in physics are being eroded. "I wonder what would happen if we didn't need them. I suppose it would be a disaster. Think of the unemployment, the riots about unemployment."
This was his game. Talk himself into not talking about his discovery. Now it was my task to reaffirm his brilliance, and be rewarded with enlightenment. Egotists can be awfully predictable at times.
"Well," I started. "Given the geopolitical scene at present, something like faster than light communication could create a unique advantage, not only tactically, but strategically as well. And given that while some people can afford array access, some other people can afford access to other people using the array. So it would deny an opponent the opportunity to gather competitive intelligence, while saving you huge sums required for access, and allowing greater access to your opponents own communications network. In our case, the Society for Mutual Benefit would really not benefit a whole lot as they already control access to a large portion of the array network. On the other hand, the Outworlders Bloc would benefit massively. Their chief handicap is the large and constantly varying amount of space between their colonies, and they're all interdependant."
The Society for Mutual Benefit was a high-sounding name for the corporate alliance who previously held control over all helium-3 production in the colonies. As Earth was heavily dependant on this clean fuel, it gave the middle men between the producers and consumers a great amount of power. That is, it would have if no one realized that they didn't need the Society for Mutual Benefit. One day, you had a solar system of happy miners, happily mining, making good money, and living happy lives. The next, you had a few loud ideologues, and angry miners, still making good money, only not living happy lives, because they feel politically disenfranchised. Then you had the Society for Mutual Benefit, and the Outworlder's Bloc. They even named themselves something exclusionary, underlining the point that they were on the outside, and Earth and the money-grubbers were on the in. I mean, for all anyone cares, they could have been the Happy Funtime Gang (subtitle - Who Wants to Take Over the Solar System) and no one would have blinked. The point was, they had the h-3, and Earth didn't.
"So, you're saying that abolishing the arrays would handicap the allied corporate forces, while increasing the relative power of the rebellious colonials?"
"More or less", but with more grinning.
Enough foreplay.
"So, now my attention is thoroughly piqued. I don't think I could get wetter. How exactly can we communicate instantly, with anyone, anywhere?"
"Well, putting it like that, you can't. But you can break the speed of light in terms of the speed at which the message is relayed, but not travels."
That was thoroughly confusing for me. I also said that.
"That's exactly what I mean - we've been thinking about it all wrong - we don't need to send messages through space. If you wanted a letter to be delivered from one place to another, and they happen to be on opposite sides of the solar system, what is the quickest way for the other person to read it?"
"Up until this morning, I thought it would have been laser beacon, through the arrays. What's faster than the speed of light?"
"Nothing, but what if they could literally see the letter you wrote, without transmitting it, as if it was there, right next to them."
"Okay, just so I'm clear on this, we're not talking about remote viewing, right? I know some people can do that, but not enough to make a viable communications network out of it."
More laughter from Jules. He doesn't take abilities seriously that can't be expressed mathematically.
"Not at all, not at all. See, we always thought that this was a science and technology problem, that someone in a labcoat in an R&D dungeon would solve with a bang and a Eureka! As it turns out, it's a philosophical problem. You're familiar with the principle of non-contradiction, yes? I thought so. Canner education isn't everything it's cracked up to be, but it's not bad overall. Anyway, nothing can be and not be, at the same place, at the same time, in the same sense. That's it. So when we send a message it has to travel, because it can't be and not be at the same place at the same time. They can't read it while you're still writing it, from miles away. There's always delay. That sort of nonsense. Well, what if your letter was just really, really big? What if they could read it, as you wrote it, from across the solar system?"
"Well, that would be great, though awkward. Everyone else could read it too."
"And that's what I love about you. So literal, but humorously so. Social etiquette and not worrying about anyone reading over your shoulder aside, what are the practical problems?"
"Well, first off is the fact that the solar system is full of trash that all has its own orbit. I mean, it's not just planets out there. There have to be hundreds of monitoring stations posting near constant traffic updates and course corrections to keep ships out of trouble."
There were over a thousand actually, once I thought about it more. Most were unmanned, but they were networked and supercomputers worked out the rest, posting updates every twenty seconds to every ship in the vacinity.
Jules agreed. "Agreed - but it's possible to plot clear paths, areas within the solar system which are never intersected by a celestial body's orbit."
"If that's our running definion of a clear path in space I'm afraid I may qualify myself. Being serious though, yes. Come to think of it I know of several spaces like that. A few are extremely popular trade lanes for heavy lifters, and two others are exclusive h-3 delivery chutes. You know, for the mag things. The catapults."
Jules leaned back with a sigh and a smile, one eyebrow cocked. "So what if your letter occupied an entire clear path between two planets? Think of it like those old wire telegraphs."
"Wire? As in, those handheld things people talked to each other with? That's a hell of a wire, millions of kilometres long. No, that's impossible. The signal was an electronic pulse, right? It still has travel time. There would be less signal degradation, but you would have to use every scrap of every metal we've ever mined to make that wire."
"We would, that's true. The difference in my system, is that the signal doesn't travel down the wire - the signal IS the wire. Instead of electrical impulses, you do this - " He picked up a stir stick from my tea, and rubbed it between his fingers. It rotated, twirling in the air.
I stared at the stir stick. Suddenly, I knew how my dog back home had felt every time it watched my synthesize it some food. It knew something important was happening, but it didn't understand what. The stick continued to twirl, and I got the distinct impression it was mocking me - even the stir stick and figured it out.
"So...you twist the wire? Holy shit, you twist it? Like...shit. You twist certain degrees for letters or symbols or....shit. That's really simple. The wire would twist itself though, wouldn't it? What about planets? Wouldn't the competing gravitational fields drag it around a fair bit?"
"Basically every material known to human science would twist. So, we looked at basic, elementary particles. Throw compounds out the window all together, same with elements on the periodic tables. You can't build it out of something with mass."
Jules bent over to his right side and retreived a small matte green box from his briefcase. He opened it - it split down the middle into two haves which slid apart on an internal track. Inside were some sundry electronics with a few small blinking lights to indicate that something profoundly scientific was happening in the box. In the middle, was a small fibre. Jules used his stir stick to prod the fibre and it floated out of the box. At the same time he drew a second instrument that was about ten centimetres long and cylindrical, and held it next to the fibre while depressing a small pressure pad at the fore end.
With all seriousness he said "I can't tell you how or what kind of field these devices generate, don't ask. But this - " He raised the cylinder and the fibre moved in accordance "has no mass. It's a monomolecular fibre, that weighs nothing, no matter how much there is of it, and what gravity well it's inside. The fields anchor it, or it would simply pass through us or the table, and stay floating in the exact same spot while the universe moves around it. Anything can pass through it to no effect, and it has no tensile properties, which makes it perfect. With our fields - that was the big discovery, not this fluff, " he said as he released the pressure pad on his cylinder. The fibre disappeared.
I starred at the space where the fibre had been. "Where'd it go? I mean I know where, but it was just.....gone!"
Jules looked at me, leaned to look out the window, and leaned back, frowning. "Well, I think it went through you, and then..."
"Through me, I...well, I think....am I okay?"
With perfect tenderness Jules softened his eyes, and I felt ten years old. "It doesn't weigh anything. What could it do to you?" The grin returned, and his eyes returned to their previous lupine state.
