Oort Rising

by Magnus Victor

  Johann cleared his throat, interrupting Klaus' thoughts. He spread his hands wide, his voice loud, as if imparting the wisdom of the ages. “Well, that’s what the QMP drive’s for, isn't it? So we can be in more places at once.”

  Chapter 7: QMP

  Johann led Klaus and PO Murphy into the QMP compartment. The door whooshed closed behind them, making Klaus grin. The doors on the Ad Astra used to groan like damned souls, when they did close properly. This ship just felt so...new. It was downright refreshing.

  And then there was Johann.

  “I still canna get this damn thing to work!” He waved his arms in the air angrily. “Every time we run the test, the code comes back garbled all to hell!” He took a seat at a stool in front of a metal desk which was heavily bolted to the wall, and powered-up his computer. "Full-function state-of-the-art quantum standalone, this is," he explained loudly, tapping the case. "Fully isolated from the ship's network, and not some stripped-down access point."

  Swiping his finger across the security scanner, Johann opened a file, and the screen filled with complete gibberish. He pointed an accusing finger at the random symbols. “And totally bloody useless! Have a look for yourself – it just can’t be done. A quantum computer simply can’t work unless it has a determinate, physical presence!”

  Klaus pulled a stool next to Johann, and looked more closely at the 'text' on the screen. There were occasional strings that he recognized as programming code, but these were far outnumbered by a confused babble of symbols, many not even native to the programming language. Klaus raised an eyebrow. He swore that some of them were clearly not native to this universe, since his eyes hurt just from looking at them. “This, I take it, is what you get back?”

  “Aye. Complete bloody quantum decoherence. We can send the computer into incorporeality and bring it back again just fine, but the code goes all to hell and it can’t find its way home. My theory is the probabilistic liberties we take with QMP play some sort of hob with the algorithms in the quantum initalization - och, don't look at me like that, Murphy, this makes perfect sense - leaving this bloody damn ... nonsense." He pounded one thick finger on the table, "And then we have to scrub the system and re-load the code, all over again from scratch.”

  PO Murphy cleared her throat. “That is, I have to re-load the code over again from scratch, sir. It takes the better part of an hour, and that is just for this simple computer, which makes the whole idea unusable for the Navy. At least we haven’t had the physical circuits fried. Yet.”

  “Hmm.” Klaus could certainly see how that would be a problem. “You mean the collider guidance, the plasma containment programs, stuff like that?"

  Murphy nodded. "Glad to have a Navy man aboard, Mr. Ericsson. Perhaps you can explain that to Dr. MacDougal."

  "Just Klaus will do," he answered, tapping his shoulder. "I'm a civilian, after all."

  Johann paid them no mind, "But the thing is, you see, if I can just discover exactly how the probabilistic collisions between the QMP and the quantum code are fighting each other, then we would really have something to write up for the journals, Why, we would —"

  Murphy shook her head and smiled at Klaus. "You see what I have to put up with?"

  Klaus just chuckled, tapping the computer screen in front of Johann to get his attention. "I'll bet that your Navy brief did not include the words 'probabilistic collisions' or 'quantum decoherence' anywhere." Johann just glowered at him. "In fact, I'll bet that they said something on the order of 'just make it work.' Am I right?"

  "Ach yes, but just think of the research we could do, my boy!"

  Klaus gave him a sharp look. "I've already been down that road, Johann, and look where it got me." He waved his hands to forestall Johann's retort. "But look, why don't we just do what the nice Navy pays us to do, and find some way to make it work?"

  Murphy looked at the ceiling, and added in a sing-song voice, "Only what I've been telling him for months."

  Klaus paced, hands in his pockets. "Captain Conagher says we have to have this working by the time we get to Andromeda station. You've been puttering around with this for months now, so why the sudden rush?"

  "I don't know, she said it was —"

  "Classified, I heard." Klaus tapped on the computer's casing. "Have you tried sending a non-quantum computer, instead?”

  “Are you daft?” Johann stared at him. “The operations to keep this ship from exploding are measured in yottaflops! Have you forgotten, man? That would take hours, if not days!”

  “Ah.” Klaus nodded, face reddening. Of course, he should have guessed that Johann would have already run the calculations.

  Murphy said nothing, just sat stiffly at her console, staring intently at the screen.

  “The irritating bit is,” continued Johann, his voice calm again — or as near to calm as his voice ever got — “not all of the code gets corrupted, so it should be possible to find something that isn't bloody garbage, and make it work.” He shrugged, patting the top of the computer casing. “So, we change the parameters and keep running test after effing test.”

  “I see.” A surprisingly practical solution, for an academic like Johann. “Given enough data, you hope to see a pattern in what code survives.”

  “Exactly.” Johann rose from his seat, and walked over to a hatch located directly opposite the one leading to the corridor outside. Tapping a command into the keypad next to it, he looked over his shoulder, and waved Klaus closer. “And to keep the Captain happy, let’s start the first test of the day.”

  With a loud hiss of in-rushing air, the hatch slowly retreated inwards towards the testing chamber. After traveling a full thirty centimeters, it halted and receded sideways into the wall of the corridor linking the control and testing compartments. The movement was almost silent, but the vibrations that rolled up through Klaus' feet betrayed how heavy the blast door really was.

  The chamber beyond was long and narrow, about four meters in width and at least a dozen in length. Three meters of height kept it from feeling cramped, though.

  At the far end of the compartment stood the test rig: a white-painted metallic cube standing atop a sturdy table. Perhaps fifty centimeters on a side, the cube's surface was marred only by carrying handles and access ports.

  “First, we inspect the rig, to make sure that nothing’s shifted, and it’s ready for the next test.” Johann started across the room without even a backwards glance.

  Murphy stopped by the entry, and added “And check the overpressure relief valve, sir.” She knelt down to inspect the valve's intake, which was covered with a plastic cap. She checked off a box on her datapad.

  Klaus nodded. “Vents to outside, I assume?”

  “That it does, sir, er, Klaus.”

  Good to see that the Navy had seen to it that the compartment was made safe for testing. The unpainted steel gave the room an industrial feel. After the pristine, smoothly-painted feel of the rest of the ship, Klaus felt truly at home again. “This looks solid,” he remarked, tapping the wall with a dull thud.

  “Aye, titanium-reinforced ceramic with a carbon-lattice backing. Stronger than anything has any business being. Would probably stop a nuke. See, those officer types don’t think that my little experiment is safe. So I have to go through the whole bloody routine of 'check the rig, close the hatch, lock the hatch, run the test, and then do it all in reverse.'” He rolled his eyes. “And the two assistants won’t let me stay in the room to watch.”

  Klaus glanced at the Petty Officer, who gave him a 'spare me' roll of the eyes, and then studiously returned to her checklist. Klaus suspected that Murphy might be the only reason that this test chamber wasn't already lined with little bits of Scottish physicist. “Well, you are messing around with some rather high-energy physics.”

  “Bah, it’s perfectly safe.” Johann waved dismissively over his shoulder, not looking up from his test box.

  “In theory. And what if the whole rig botched the translation back to corporeality? Sa
y, if it tried to fit too much mass into too little space?”

  “Bah, that’s impossible. QMP theory clearly states that matter won’t emerge in densely-occupied space.” Johann gestured around the room. “In any case, we pump this room as close t' a vacuum as it'll get for each test. Nowhere near a perfect vacuum, but less than fifty pascals of pressure. Easily below the danger limit.”

  “Isn't that the same theory that failed to predict that translation would mess with your computer’s data?”

  Johann completed his inspection, and stood. “All right, lad. Fair point.” He patted the top of the test rig, his voice once again energized. “Regardless, let's get this piece of tripe ready, then.” He attached cables to the open ports on either side of the cube. As each cable was inserted, PO Murphy would verbally confirm it and check off a box on her datapad.

  “Osmium input, check. Computer IO, check. Trigger pulse input, check.”

  While the two completed their pre-test checklist, Klaus studied the receiving rig, nearer to the entrance hatch. If the experiment worked correctly — and from what it sounded like, that was unlikely — the test cube would be teleported from its current position over to the receiving rig. Just as importantly, the high-power quantum computer contained within the cube would still have all of its programming intact and ready to function. Not a long jump at all, but that wasn't really the point.

  “Primary vacuum sensor, check. Emergency cutoff valve, check. Main power bus, check.”

  The walls of the compartment were lined with cylindrical capacitors, reaching from the deck to the ceiling. Klaus was no Luddite, but the thought of just how much power was stored in those metal cylinders, less than an arm's reach from him, made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  Johann stepped back from the test rig, clapping his hands once. “And that's that. All ready for the next test.”

  “Not quite, sir. The compartment integrity has not been confirmed.” The Petty Officer stepped quickly over to a series of lights embedded into the bulkhead.

  Johann sidled over to Klaus, and muttered under his breath. “Y'see what I have to put up with? Nothing happened last test, or the dozen before it. The room's as pristine as the day the ship launched, not a single mark on it. But don't try telling that to my resident rules-monkeys.”

  “Every check has its purpose, Johann.” No sense tempting Murph - er, fate, after all. Klaus shuddered to think of what would have happened to the Ad Astra if he himself hadn't been thorough, some of his crew had called it pathological, in his system maintenance. Probably would have come apart at the seams just leaving port.

  Not that it helped the ship — or the crew — in the end. He shook off the negative thoughts with a force of will. He needed to stay focused on this experiment. “We've already got one Murphy in the room, Johann. No sense inviting the other.”

  "Ahem," Murphy cleared her throat , “Compartment structural integrity, seals, and data recorders check clear, sirs.”

  “Bloody finally.” responded Johann, walking out through the entry tunnel back to the lab.

  Klaus followed, and Murphy stopped outside the tunnel, and tapped a command into the control panel outside. She spoke softly to herself. "Close the test seal, Murphy. Test seal closing, aye," as he checked off another box. She winked over her shoulder at Klaus. The hatch plug slid back into the tunnel and slowly advanced to seal the test compartment. It was tapered, larger at the interior side, so that any overpressure would push it tighter into its seals. When it reached the fully-closed position, a row of lights — two green, one orange — came on underneath the control panel.

  Murphy tapped each of the lights in turn. “Compartment seal verified, pressure within acceptable limits.” She un-clipped a keycard from a lanyard around her neck, and inserted it into a slot next to the control panel. The last light switched from orange to green. “Cleared to proceed with next test iteration. Sir.”

  Ah, good, Klaus thought. Maybe the Navy did indeed know Johann. At the very least, they had ensured that the physicist couldn't run the test until someone more...practical...verified that it was safe to proceed.

  Johann patted the seat next to him. “Have a seat, lad; this'll take just a bit.”

  Klaus took the proffered stool, but his attention was locked on Johann typing away at the computer. The mess of symbols were quite rapidly being replaced by recognizable, albeit complex, code. “Shouldn't it take longer to overwrite all of the junk software?”

  “Nay, although it used to. After the first dozen iterations or so, I figured it'd save time t' divide the code into sections. Very, very small sections, a few bits each. That way, the command overlay can quickly compare the software to the periodic checksums we planted, and over-write only when necessary.”

  “Isn't that all of the time?”

  “That's the odd part, lad. Some of the code comes through okay, but it's never the same code. Ruins the program as a whole, but the bit-patterns themselves are often still there.”

  Interesting. “How much surviving code are we talking, here?”

  “Eh, usually about twenty to twenty-five percent.” The blue glow of the display made Johann's ruddy face look downright pale. “Enough to cut down on the time required t' re-load everything, thank God.” He pointed at a progress bar creeping along the bottom of the display. “We're about a quarter done. It's mostly automated by now.”

  “If the recovery is automated, couldn't we have the functional code sections re-build the software by themselves after transition?”

  “Tried that already, Klaus.” Johann shook his head. “There's no way to predict which bits come through unchanged. No matter how redundant I make them, they just refuse to re-connect to each other without manual input. It's the damndest thing, too. The code's there, everything should work, but it just doesn't.”

  Very odd. “Still, at least it works as a drive.” In theory.

  “Aye. Except we would have t' manually re-boot all of the ship's systems afterward.”

  Murphy turned toward them, from her seat at the observer's desk. “Which defeats the purpose. The QMP drive is needed for tactical maneuvering, not travel. If we have to spend ten minutes with no grav, no reactor containment, no life support, no shields, no nav, all the while getting shot at, then the drive is useless to us. Too dangerous to use in combat, too expensive to use anywhere else.”

  She looked at Klaus, catching herself. "But of course, you already know that." She turned back to her console.

  Klaus nodded. Leave it to the PO to put her finger on the truth. Osmium remained one of the most expensive elements in the system, absurdly difficult to obtain, and the QMP drive burned it like diesel fuel. “I see,” Klaus said quietly. Murphy had a good head on her shoulders. Maybe she was here to supervise Johann, not the other way around.

  He was at a loss regarding the code, though. No ideas on how to fix it. Maybe some other tack. He thought back to his student days, back to the other issues he and Johann had worked on. “Any progress on just where the cube goes between disappearance and re-materialization?”

  It was the kind of question that would fascinate Johann, full of unverifiable theory. When Klaus had last worked with the technology, nobody had any idea where objects actually went while being teleported. Or whether they went anywhere at all recognizable to human perception. In theory, they were reduced to oscillating between thousands of superimposed quantum states, none of them with any certainty, meaning that they didn't technically have a location. Quantum machines that were teleported came back with their data corrupted and so couldn't answer the question of just where they thought they had been. Standard machines recorded nothing.

  It sounded counter-intuitive, yet there had been no negative effects on the various living animals which had been sent through. The few humans who had gone reported various types of discomfort on the trip, but nobody had any idea where they had actually been. It was all quite strange.

  “That's still a mystery for the ages, despite my rese
arch. It would be another one for the journals, if we only knew.” replied Johann, then sighed. “But on t' other hand, if it'd make the bloody thing work properly, and soon, it could route everything through hell itself for all I care.” He shook his head. “At any rate, let's just get on with this test.”

  Murphy called over her shoulder, hands on her console. “Aye, sir. Beginning test alpha-27, iteration twenty-three.” She typed in a command. “Test run initialized.”

  Klaus' eyes were glued to the display fed from the cameras in the test room. No matter how many times he'd seen a QMP rig in action, it was still an amazing sight.

  For a moment, the camera feeds showed perfect stillness. Then, the image rippled as heavy-duty capacitors discharged, pouring exajoules of power into the test cube's lattice of tubes. Much of the power was diverted to high-power lasers running through the center of the tubes, bent into the shape of the cube by focused gravitational fields.

  The lasers ignited the gaseous osmium in the tubes, boiling it into a plasma. The last gasps of the electrical current ran through this plasma conduit, stripping off loose electrons.

  Less than a heartbeat after the capacitors activated, the cube disappeared. There was no slow transition, no fading afterimage.

  One instant the cube was there. The next, it was gone.

  “Test vehicle launched.” recorded PO Murphy.

  Despite himself, despite his history with Johann, Klaus felt his lips pull into an ear-to-ear grin. This, now this was what he'd missed when drudging on the Ad Astra.

  He held his breath, counting. QMP transitions rarely took longer than ten seconds. If Johann's assurances were anything to go by, then the cube would re-materialize in the target zone instead of back at the test rig, but Klaus wasn't getting his hopes up, not yet. After all, he hadn't had a chance to fiddle with the setup himself.

  “And there goes our latest test.” Johann sighed expansively.

  Seven, seven-point-five, eig— the cube popped back into existence.

  In the test rig, as expected.