The oort federation, p.4
The Oort Federation, page 4
She turned and stepped through the portal.
_________
1 See the First Oort Chronicle, Icicle: A Tensor Matrix
Chapter Three
OORT STATION PRIME—CHAIRMAN JOHN BUTLER’S OFFICE
“So, my bottom line,” Kimberly said to Chairman Butler, “is that Masin Arcah appears open to talking with us about his homeworld, Rogan, and whatever role he might play in avoiding future conflict. Adrhun Gloalorn, on the other hand, may turn out to be a problem. He appears to come from a more rigid society than Masin, and seems less inclined to deviate from his assignment. I do not even slightly understand the psychology of either alien, so I am giving you feedback based on my instincts.”
Kimberly continued. “I know that we are gearing up for a counter-attack on the Asterians. I’m having my doubts. The Asterian fleet departed eighty-four years ago. If we can develop an appropriate power source, we can be there long before the lone survivor arrives to warn the Asterians. But is that who we are? Are we ready to wipe out an entire race of beings with whom we can relate, discuss, and negotiate? Did we populate our Solar System so we could depopulate theirs?”
Kimberly lightly placed her arms around Butler’s neck, locking her blue eyes to his brown. “We’re better than that,” she said and kissed him.
After Kimberly left, Butler sat at his desk in thought. When he agreed to become Chairman of the Oort Federation, he had casually assumed that the job would be similar to what he did as president of the United States. This had consisted of face-to-face meetings with his cabinet and members of Congress, Link calls with foreign leaders, legislation to review, photo-ops scheduled by his staff, his time almost completely managed by someone in the bureaucracy of the executive branch.
As Chairman of the Oort Federation, he had only a small staff, and he worked closely with each member. Kimberly was his liaison to the American president and through him to the rest of Earth. As when he was president, this seemed to work better than trying to work with the United Nations General Secretary. Butler saw himself as the cheerleader keeping various parts of the Federation working in harmony rather than at cross-purposes. In other words, he said to himself, I am the figurehead of a system that really needs no leader…, he grinned inwardly,…except when it does.
He activated a Link call on a circuit Thorpe had established for him. “Thorpe, Braxton, can you both meet me in my Federation office?”
Within moments, two nearly identical holoimages appeared—Thorpe with a slight green overtone, and Braxton wearing a mustache and showing a faint blue coloration.
“Even after all this time,” Butler said, “it’s still a shock to see both of you together.” He smiled. “Anyway, thanks for coming.” He leaned back in his chair in thought for a moment. “I’m having second thoughts about our plans for the Aster System.” When it appeared that Thorpe was about to speak, Butler held up his hand. “I know we were attacked…without provocation. But Kimberly’s dealings with the prisoners have led her to believe that the Asterians are not united, that there is a lot of difference between the Rogan and Frohlic cultures. We should be looking at this carefully as we move forward with our plans.
“Another thing…both of you spend a lot of time inside the GlobalNet. Can you give me a sense of what the people of Earth think about the Federation, the Asterians, Phoenix, Ogden, and the growing presence of Udachny? How is Earth dealing with portals? What is the impact of uploads?”
Butler knew that his questions could take days to answer properly, but he also knew Thorpe and Braxton. They would have something to say.
Thorpe spoke first. “You know, John, that both of us are roaming the GlobalNet as you and I speak? In fact, each of us is carrying out dozens of tasks simultaneously…all the time.”
Butler nodded.
“Frankly, most people just live their lives, going to work, watching holovision, school athletic contests, professional games… They don’t spend much time thinking about anything outside of their immediate existence.
“There are exceptions, of course. The Chinese are still recovering from the terrible destruction from the Asterian asteroid attack. Areas of the planet still remain underdeveloped. We have managed to quell most armed uprisings by power-hungry warlords.”
“That being said,” Braxton jumped in, “we are beginning to see an increase in such armed uprisings. We haven’t found the source—if there is one source.”
“About uploads,” Thorpe continued, “they seem to be an accepted part of life on Earth. The process is ubiquitous virtually everywhere. Daphne and Kimberly certainly got that one right.”
“I agree,” Braxton said. “Earth authorities no longer try to control the process. Kimberly negotiated a method for host countries to receive a modest tax with each transaction. Since virtually everyone uploads, this has turned out to be a steady source of revenue for governments. Smart girl, that Kimberly!”
“Phoenix doesn’t really impinge on the average person’s consciousness,” Thorpe said. “Portals are portals—everyone uses them. Spaceships are spaceships, at least for those relatively few who use them.”
“It’s all about power, you know,” Braxton added. “What Phoenix supplies from the various power swarms makes portal use an invisible part of everyone’s lives. Water isn’t piped to a sink; it’s ported to the faucet under appropriate pressure. It doesn’t drain to a sewer; it’s ported somewhere appropriate. Office workers don’t walk or drive to work; they walk through a door to their respective workplaces. It’s everywhere.”
“I sometimes try to imagine,” Thorpe said, “the uncounted millions of wormholes parsing through nullspace. Even my hugely expanded mental capacity can’t grasp it.” He sighed. “We need to be thinking about expanding our power supply. Sally’s and Brad’s people are working on reproducing the Asterian mini black hole—we call it the MBH. When they solve the riddle—and they will—I am thinking about building a large artificial island in the Kuiper Belt and placing an MBH at its core. This would supply a level of power that would dwarf everything we have right now.”
“And that brings up Udachny,” Braxton said. “Isidor Orlov is not a cooperative player like nearly everyone else in the Solar System…with the possible exception of China. We need to keep a close eye on him and his activities, or sooner or later, we will find his knife in our collective backs.”
After Thorpe and Braxton left, Butler sat at his desk contemplating what they had said. They had a clear focus, although they didn’t actually bring it up. The Solar System was under control—mostly, thanks to their efforts. Their focus, however, was clearly outward. And that left him, John Butler, tweed-coated, bow-tied academic, in charge of the whole kit and kaboodle.
He reached behind him to an old-fashioned bookcase and pulled out the fifth leather-bound volume of Dumas Malone’s Jefferson and His Time, detailing Jefferson’s second term. Butler had learned a lot from Jefferson, but there was so much more to absorb. Jefferson expanded the United States to its present configuration for the most part. For Butler, there was much to be learned from this. Of what little free time he had, Butler spent much of it studying Jefferson, and also Ulysses S. Grant, the unappreciated man who kept the country together when everything seemed to point to another civil war. He touched another leather-bound book on his shelf, To Rescue the Republic: Ulysses S. Grant, the Fragile Union, and the Crisis of 1876, by Bret Baier, but left it there. Over the years, he had practically memorized this book.
While sipping on a ten-year-old French cru Beaujolais, Butler searched out several passages from Malone, examining them from his perspective as Chairman of the Oort Federation. The wisdom, he knew, was timeless in its application.
DENVER—PHOENIX COMPLEX
“We’ve got something to show you,” Brad Kominsky said to Thorpe.
“Where?” Thorpe asked.
“Lab seven; I’ll meet you there.” Brad turned and left the office.
Thorpe didn’t need an office to work, but he found it convenient to meet with someone in a physical office from time to time. Not everyone on Earth was comfortable dealing with an ethereal tensor matrix. By appearing as a holoimage, Thorpe gave the impression that he was simply present through a Link. That was something everyone knew.
A few minutes later, Thorpe’s holoimage joined Sally and Brad in Lab 7. eSally and eBrad hung as holoimages above them, and Max crowded their legs, moving between the couple. A large, glass-sided tank rested on the table against the rear wall. Brad brought up a holoimage displaying an engineering drawing of the working model of a small steam engine. He nodded to Sally, who threw a switch on the wall.
The tank clouded slightly, causing light that penetrated to refract by frequency, giving a rainbow effect. A form began to grow inside the tank. Within five minutes, it was recognizable as the steam engine from the drawing. After ten minutes the process stopped; Brad removed the tank cover and retrieved the engine. He placed it on the workbench and attached it to a heat and water source he had placed there earlier. Within moments, the little engine started running, spinning a flywheel that would have been capable of doing work.
“It’s not three-D printing,” Thorpe said. “The inside is too intricate for that process.” He examined it closely. “Stainless steel, brass, moving piston, ball bearings, the works.” He looked at Sally and Brad. “Okay, how did you do it?”
Sally produced a holoimage of what looked like a beetle with four legs and two manipulators. “A nanobot,” she said. A scale appeared on the holoimage. The beetle was two hundred nanometers long and one hundred nanometers wide. “Millions of these,” she pointed to the holoimage, “built that.” She pointed to the steam engine, all the while hiding a smile with her hand.
KUIPER BELT—OGDEN ENTERPRISES
Only recently had Dr. Jackson Fredricks moved his center of operations to the Ogden Complex in the Kuiper Belt. He had no particular reason for delaying the move except that he had gotten comfortable in Denver after moving from Los Angeles when the Icicle formed Phoenix Labs. Fredricks stroked his goatee as he reviewed the results from the follow-on to the cloning of Max. He smiled to himself.
Following the successful cloning and download, he had uploaded Maxter, calling him eMaxter. He rounded up eMax, which turned out to be quite a task since the uploaded tabby had learned to roam the entire Solar System through its many swarms and portals. He finally accomplished this by working through eDaphne, who had a special relationship with eMax. Fredricks confined eMax to a matrix and soothed him electronically. He put eMax and eMaxter side-by-side, each in separate matrixes, and sedated them electronically. Then he performed a complete comparison of both matrixes. The report from this comparison was on the holodisplay before him.
“Daphne,” Fredricks spoke up, knowing she could hear him if she was in her office. She stuck her head through the door.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Round up Kimberly and Dale and meet me here in a few minutes, please,” he told her.
Daphne, Kimberly, and Dale made themselves comfortable in chairs around Fredricks’ desk. Their uploads were also present but chose not to make themselves visible.
“You all know about Maxter and eMaxter,” Fredricks said. “I just completed a full comparison of eMax and eMaxter. They are identical except for a few small differences. These differences may have resulted from quantum fluctuations, or even the small amount of experience Maxter had before we uploaded him.
“I want to run a series of simian tests where we upload, clone, download into the clone, and upload again. Then we compare the first and second uploads. Run at least ten tests, and for heaven’s sake, don’t become attached to the monkeys.”
Dale and his technicians actually ran the tests. Daphne ran the business, and Kimberly spent time with Chairman Butler (some private), President George Fulton, and the two Asterians.
Everyone was interested in the tests’ outcome, but Dale took his time, meticulously identifying and classifying the microbiome for each of the simian species and then moving through each cloning stage, recording the results and the discrepancies. The process was not without its problems. A monkey got loose and tore up a lab before they finally confined the little troublemaker. Despite all his precautions, one of the female lab techs became strongly attached to an orangutan who returned her affection. Dale ended up promising the tech that when the tests were over, she could take possession of the creature.
Finally, about three months later, Dale wrapped up his testing. Except for the orangutan-turned-pet, he destroyed the cloned test subjects, although he retained their DNA and microbiome records. He placed the first and second-order uploads in stasis and consolidated his notes. Then he placed a Link call to Fredricks.
“Dr. Fredricks, the tests are done, and I uploaded the results for your review.”
The following day, Daphne, Kimberly, and Dale, along with their uploads, met with Fredricks in his office under the Ogden dome.
“I imagine you girls have read Dale’s report,” Fredricks said without preamble.
The four nodded.
“Give us a summary, Dale, one that anyone can understand, that Kimberly can use in her publicity.”
“We used four subject groups, monkeys, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas—three in each group. We uploaded each individual host. Then we cloned the host, including its microbiome, and downloaded the original upload into the clone. As soon as possible thereafter, typically within minutes, we uploaded the cloned copy and compared the original upload with the secondary. We completed the process two more times for each subject. We back-tested the fourth and third-order uploads with the first and second. Once we had tabulated the results, we saved the host and clone DNA, destroyed the clone, and put both uploads into stasis. We completed twelve full runs, obtaining four uploads for each run, then compared and cross-tabulated the results. The report you reviewed incorporated those results.
“And they are…,” Dale held the small group in suspense for a few seconds. “We think we are ready to clone and download a human being. We looked carefully for the errors we saw with Maxter. We found a couple each time, but they appear to be random quantum errors. The degradation in the fourth-order downloads was virtually undetectable—comparable to what we all experience during our lives from cosmic radiation hits.”
Stunned silence settled over the room. Then Daphne tossed her red mane away from her face and said, “Our business model just changed drastically. Right now, we upload flesh-and-blood people, and then we activate their uploads when they die. We have just created a way for people to remain biologically perpetually young—or any age they choose. We will have to work out the logistics, like cloning an eighty-year-old woman into a twenty-five-year-old girl’s body.” She stopped talking, deep in thought. “Let’s talk with Thorpe and Braxton about this before we move ahead. The implications are staggering.”
MOON & MARS-SUN L4—UDACHNY
During the workup to the Asterian invasion, Academician Sergii Anatoly Borisovich and his team at the Institut Kosmecheskikh had developed a working MERT Portal. Like the Phoenix MERT Portal, their portal locus created a Casimir field that generated a wormhole. But instead of producing a hyper-disk, their locus produced a brick-like device that would establish a MERT Portal back to the locus when activated. It behaved just like a hyper-disk but was more cumbersome and required more power. This additional power requirement limited the range and size of their portals.
Orlov brought Borisovich and his team to the Udachny Moon-headquarters, where they diligently pursued an improved MERT Portal with a smaller hyper-brick and lower power requirement. Simultaneously, Orlov created a manufacturing system for power thinsats. Since he was unaware of the nanobot development at Phoenix, his manufacturing facility looked much like the facility Phoenix had installed at Phoenix Denver.
Orlov sat at his desk, held down by only 17% of Earth’s gravity, gazing at a holoimage of a pretty girl—Natasha, from his days before leaving Earth. As a young man, he had loved her passionately, and she him—until she discovered what he did for a living. She had broken his heart. After that, he set out to demonstrate that no man or woman was his equal, in anything, anywhere, and he would never be beaten again. Udachny became a universal powerhouse throughout the Solar System, second only to Phoenix but gaining ground. Orlov returned the holoimage to its storage space and turned his attention to matters at hand.
He called Borisovich to discuss building a VASIMR propelled spacecraft in the shortest amount of time. He wanted to use a portal to supply the necessary energy. Borisovich, practical as always, counseled against it.
“If something happens during flight, if the portal fails and we cannot reestablish it, you are stranded. I strongly recommend using a variable-output gas-core reactor,” Borisovich said. “We inject gaseous uranium-hexafluoride fissile material (we call it hex) into a fused silica vessel where it produces extremely high-energy ultraviolet light. The variable fissile density of the gas allows us to control the reactor’s output. The VASIMR hydrogen propellant flows around the transparent vessel, absorbing the high-energy ultraviolet, and then is directed into the three VASIMR engines driving the spacecraft. The hydrogen chamber’s outer wall is lined with photovoltaics that convert the high-energy ultraviolet directly into electricity. We divert part of this power for ship functions, and the rest drives the VASIMR engines.”
“Would you translate that for me, please,” Orlov said with mild frustration.
“Bottom line is,” Borisovich said with a grin, “the reactor produces more than sufficient electricity, and it preheats the hydrogen fuel. The VASIMR engines generate high-frequency radio waves to ionize the super-hot hydrogen propellant into extremely hot plasma. Magnetic fields accelerate the plasma to generate thrust.”
