Sharifi turned away from the display to pace a short circuit along the tile floor of the laboratory. As if in response to the muted echo of her footsteps, the map gave way to a long-distance probe image of a planet half-cloaked in night. Li took in the blood-and-rust hue of the landmasses, the cloudlike swirls of algae bloom on the northern steppes, the primitive geometry of tailings piles big enough to be seen from high orbit. Compson’s World.
“Coal. Oil. Uranium. Water. This is not the first time humanity has depended on a nonrenewable resource. And, as past ages have discovered, there are only two ways out of this dependence. Either you learn to do without the nonrenewable resource—or you learn to make more of it.”
Gradually, so gradually that it seemed to be no more than the rising of Compson’s World’s distant sun, a pair of Bose-Einstein crystals took shape on the screen, superimposed on the brooding image of the planet.
“So,” Sharifi said, turning away from the screen again. “How do we make more of it? And what, if we can allow ourselves to dream a little, would UN space look like with a cheap, unlimited supply of artificial condensate?”
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. Each Bose-Einstein bed is, in effect, an immense, landlocked coral reef, growing in an ocean of coal and rock.”
The stratum faded, and the lab reappeared around them.
“Bose-Einstein strata are too different from terrestrial carbon-based life for us to draw any direct conclusions,” Sharifi said. “Still, the analogy is a fruitful one. The strata display many of the characteristics of a primitive colonial intelligence. Stimuli pass from one segment of each stratum to other segments. More intriguing, several experiments have established that the condensates pass interstratal as well as intrastratal messages by quantum replication, leading to the supposition that all of Compson’s strata may have originated in a single organism, and that the ability of their component condensate beds to maintain pure entanglement supplies with only minimal decoherence is an evolved survival trait. Whatever the explanation, it is this organism that we need to understand in order to culture live condensate.
“We are now a century into the quantum era, but despite all our advances, we are primitives. We use condensates, but we don’t control them, don’t understand them. In quantum terms, we are little better than prehistoric cave dwellers who nourish a lightning-sparked flame, knowing they lack the power to rekindle it. I am asking you to help us step into a new era—an era in which we will take control of this extraordinary resource, understand it, master it, use it to unite our species as we have not been united since the Evacuation.”
Sharifi moved in to close the sale. She started talking practical applications, patents, proprietary data. She alluded to the potential profits without ever quite putting hard numbers to them. This was sexy science, buffed, polished, and carefully wrapped for consumption by corporate donors.
“Any questions?” Sharifi asked after the wrap-up.
“Yes.” Li kept her voice deliberately flat. “How the hell did you convince the Secretariat to waive the Zahn Act restrictions and clear a genetic to work on this project?”
Sharifi blinked and stiffened, looking genuinely insulted. “Forgive me,” she said coolly. She sounded as if she were working hard to stay polite. “I can’t say that’s a question I expected. We have of course obtained all the necessary TechComm clearances. However, if you have concerns about security issues, I can refer you to the appropriate officials.”
The program was good. Sharifi had laid out the money to get an AI with enough power and personality to sell the simulation. She must have needed big money, and needed it fast. And she’d gotten it, or she’d never have made it to Compson’s in the first place.
RingServ: 17.10.48.
“What do you think?” Li asked two hours later, sitting at an outdoor table just off the Calle Mexico.
Cohen shrugged—a shrug that Li felt in the numbers even as she saw it. “I think Sharifi needed money. Badly.”