Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  IV. Bob tells Alice when he detects the correct filter scheme that Alice is using. Both of them might know she was using east, for instance. He doesn’t say whether the olive he measured was up or down, east or west.

  V. Both Alice and Bob know the orientation of the olive. Alice knows it because she’s the one who sent it out. Bob knows it because, after filtering up-down olives from east-west olives, he subsequently measures the exact orientation, either up, down, east, or west.

  Following this procedure generates a random number. Both Alice and Bob arrive at this number without having to say it to one another. Alice gets it from the olives she shot out. Bob gets it from his measurements combined with his knowledge of Alice’s polarization filter. Both of them throw out the olives that were measured incorrectly. The olives they keep, they translate into 1s and 0s.

  They have tacitly exchanged a onetime code key.

  But Eve has been up to her usual tricks, and she’s been listening in. She attempts to measure Alice’s olives herself. She listens to Alice and Bob’s subsequent conversation. But all she learns is what filters Alice used, and what olives Bob’s measured correctly. She does not know Bob’s filter scheme . Neither does Alice. But Alice doesn’t need to know what filter Bob was using. She knows the orientation of the original olives she sent out. Eve will have guessed wrong half of the time. On these olives, Bob will have gotten his filter wrong, and he and Alice will throw out the result. But on some of them, he’ll have gotten his filter right. He and Alice will know this particular olive’s orientation with neither Alice nor Bob having to say it aloud. Eve will be stuck with her mismeasurement, and no orientation data.

  Here’s an example: Alice shoots out a down olive through an up-down filter. Bob measures the olive. Alice tells Bob she was using an up-down filter. Eve, in this instance, was using an east-west filter. All she knows is that the olive was not east-west-oriented—that it is up-down-oriented. Bob knows not only that it was an up-down olive, but also that this particular olive was down. Alice knows this, too.

  Sometimes Eve gets her filter right. Alice shoots an east olive through an east-west filter. Eve uses an east-west filter, and determines the olive to be east. But Bob has used an up-down filter. He guessed incorrectly, so he and Alice throw this result out.

  By sending many olives, Bob and Alice will arrive at values that both of them know, but that Eve cannot know because of the method she used to measure the olives.

  If we now switch from the amazing olives to the prosaic single photon as our means of communication, another fact emerges. Alice and Bob will know that Eve is listening in. As Heisenberg noted, Eve’s observations of the photons’ polarization will change some of those polarizations. Alice and Bob can repeat the process until they shake Eve’s tail.

  Alice and Bob are not sending and receiving olives, of course. They are using photons or some other fundamental physical particle. These particles have various properties that are analogous to the toothpick orientation.

  No matter how clever and resourceful Eve may be, she will be defeated by a quantum principle of physics: Every fundamental particle has pairs of properties that, if you measure one precisely, you cannot know the other. Furthermore, your measurement of one of these properties will change the other.

  For code makers, this is not a problem on the sending or receiving end, but it wreaks havoc with the code breaker attempting to intercept a message as the message travels along its course. Any attempt to read a message “in flight” will garble the message in such a way that the receiver knows it has been messed with.

  Using their onetime cipher pad, Alice transmits her instructions to Bob.

  Terminate Lord Yellowknife. Put the poison in the chicken soup at lunch.

  Eve loses her employer—and her job—because of the kinks of quantum physics.

  This secret code is not unbreakable because of the limitations of technology. It is absolutely unbreakable. The laws of physics guarantee it. The only way the code can be broken is if a new scientific principle can be discovered that contravenes the physical principles that the code makes use of.

  It was at this time that cryptology came out of the shadowy world of spies and covert intelligence and entered into all of our lives on a very personal level.

  The rudimentary technology is fairly ancient. In 1995, another team implemented the Bennett-Brassard scheme in an old-time optic cable that stretched twenty-three kilometers from the Earth city of Geneva, Switzerland, to the hamlet of Nyon. By the first years of the twenty-first century, most advanced Earth governments had quantum cryptographic connections between their rulers and the top levels of their military forces and intelligence services. It was revealed in 2050, for example, that by the year 2006, the center of executive power in the old United States of America, the White House, was linked by a crude quantum-cryptographic optic cable to America’s military headquarters, the Pentagon.

  For the next nine hundred years, no one could find a way to break into these sorts of systems. It seemed that the code makers held a permanent, unbeatable advantage.

  Eight

  The attack on Noctis Labyrinthus displayed in the virtuality as a pelota match. Aubry had never been a huge fan of the game, but she knew the rules and basics well enough. You couldn’t help knowing something about it, after all—except for tiny pockets of resistance here and there in the Met, pelota was played by all of humanity.

  You also couldn’t help knowing who Bastumo was—the greatest striker ever to play the game. It was general knowledge.

  Alvin Nissan, who, along with Jill, was the cocommander of the current operation as well as the attack planner, had been a huge pelota fan before the war. Aubry, who had known him since his days as a pacifist Friend of Tod on the doomed mycelium of Nirvana, had to admit that he’d awakened her interest in the sport. Alvin had whiled away the long hours of hiding between raids with involved descriptions and spirited virtual replays of glorious pelota games of the past.

  Aubry understood now, in a way she hadn’t when she was a child, how an intelligent person could also be a fan of the game. And, the truth was, for the past few e-years her life had been incredibly physical. She was always on the move. She was sixteen e-years of age. Her entire body had been reworked—transformed—into, basically, a weapon of attack. She was quick, resourceful, and deadly when she had to be. Those were the qualities it took to survive as a partisan fighter within the Met.

  They were also the qualities for a world-class pelota striker. Even if she hadn’t cared for the game, she was perfectly honed to be good at it.

  Noctis Labyrinthus was a physical and virtual prison. Inside were what must be millions of free-convert inmates. Not even the v-hacked files of the Department of Immunity had an exact count. The Met was becoming empty of free converts. It was as if a vacuum cleaner had swept through the grist and any person who did not have some physical embodiment—whether it be as a solitary individual or a LAP—was sucked up into the devouring hose. Venturing into the virtuality was an eerie experience for Aubry, who was half free convert herself. A stroll beside the River Klein—the fabulous eleven-dimensional river that flowed through the merci and the virtual embodiment of the great data flow of all inner-system humanity—was a lonely affair. The Promenade was empty. Everyone was either missing or in hiding. The Promenade had once been a thoroughfare of free-convert life—where one brought the family for a weekend stroll or for a vacation near the water.

  Aubry fondly remembered walking along beside the river and holding tightly to her mother’s hand. Sint was in a stroller that Danis was pushing. He made the clicking, digital white noise of free-convert babies. No one who saw him on the Promenade would have suspected that he was half-biological, his aspect body ensconced in the apartment on Mercury.

  “Look over there,” Danis had said, pointing across the river and through the ninth dimension—a dimension direction in which only a free convert could see. “Who do you think that is?”

  Aubry e
nhanced her magnification and stared at the spot her mother was pointing to.

  “There’s a mommy and stroller with a baby in it, just like us,” Aubry said.

  “That’s right,” said Danis, laughing. “And a little girl walking with her mommy and the baby. Why don’t you wave to them?”

  Aubry had waved and was delighted to see the girl on the opposite bank simultaneously wave at her.

  “How about that?” Danis said. “She’s waving at you, too.”

  It dawned on Aubry that she was somehow looking at a mirror image of herself. In fact, the very idea of herself as separate from everything else suddenly filled Aubry’s mind. It had been her first moment of real self-awareness, and she remembered it clearly. She was Aubry. Aubry was unique. She was special. Aubry was a person.

  I’m me, Aubry had thought. Me, and nobody else.

  Aubry made a face. The other girl did, too. She turned a cartwheel. The same with the other.

  “I’m somebody!” Aubry exclaimed, tugging on Danis’s hand. “That girl is me !”

  “And you are she,” said Danis.

  “And nobody else?” Aubry answered.

  “Nobody else but you.” Danis squeezed Aubry’s hand, and they continued their walk along the Promenade of the Klein. Every once in a while, Aubry stole a glance into the ninth dimension just to be sure her doppelganger was following along, too.

  And she always was.

  Nowadays, Aubry used stealth wraps when she stole along the Promenade. With this precaution, she cast no reflection in any directional dimension. She sometimes used the pathway to make a virtual communication precisely because most free converts had been rounded up, and only the occasional DI patrol visited the place. She could always elude them by taking a dip into the River Klein itself—a feat only a free convert or free-convert kin could accomplish. The trick was to mentally divide by zero before ducking under. Keeping the result in mind would anchor you against the swift flow of integers that could otherwise sweep you away and drown you.

  Back to the task at hand, Aubry thought. The deadly pelota game she was about to engage in. Aubry slipped half in and half out of the virtuality. She was extremely adept at doing so.

  Like Ms. Lately used to tell me at school, Aubry thought, I’d make a good LAP.

  In the virtuality, there was a pelota arena. On the other end of the playing cylinder, she saw the spinning propeller of the goal. It comprised the “commutative” entryway the partisans were attempting to establish into the prison camp—a way in for them, a way out for the inmates.

  But between Aubry and the goal was the opposing team. Security. These were the deadly security algorithms provided by the cryptography division of the DI as guards and gatekeepers of Silicon Valley. The pelota game was an illusion for them as well. Its purpose was to serve as a sort of hypnotism to the guard programming—a waking dream that the v-hacks on the partisan side had created to keep security occupied. It only had to work long enough for the partisans to score a goal, gain “root,” and wipe the DI algorithms from existence with a single executed command line.

  The purpose of the game was deadly serious, however. It was to implant a virus into the concentration camp’s algorithmic structure. The virus was of a peculiar nature. The inspired creation of Alvin and his team of free-convert partisan v-hacks, it was a public encryption key. It was designed to infiltrate and integrate with the camp’s own gatekeeping functions.

  But calling it a “key” was deceptive, because it was really a lock. A new lock that would convince an old door to accept it, replacing its own lock with this “better” model.

  Subverting the prison doors was an easy matter for the v-hack team. The trick would be to slip the new key past the camp’s security programs.

  The ball in this game of pelota was, in fact, the virus. And the game was the representational analogy for its insertion.

  Aubry possessed the private key that would then be able to open all the prison doors.

  It was the Hand of Tod.

  Nine

  From

  Cryptographic Man

  Secret Code and the Genesis of Modern Individuality

  By Andre Sud, D. Div, Triton

  With the advent of the grist, quantum cryptology became central to our humanity. To understand why this is, we should review a few facts.

  First, and most basic: Each individual person has a bodily aspect, a convert, and a grist pellicle that mediates between aspect and convert, and connects each person to the information sea that the world became after the invention of grist in the 2600s.

  Before the grist, brains were linked to computer augmentation by crude nanotechnological means. It was not possible to upload a complete personality into the virtuality. After the grist, doing so became possible. And with complete uploading came the possibility of making multiple copies.

  Three distinct “representational types” of human beings came into existence. There were normal, singular individuals. But within a few decades, every human in existence from conception to grave was coated inside and out with grist. And after the advent of the grist, nearly every human being who has lived has created an algorithmic copy of him- or herself, a convert, to aid in the various interactions and intricacies of modern life.

  A second type of human was the free convert—people who live entirely in the virtuality and do not have bodies, or—if they do—have biological or robotic bodies created by themselves. These bodies serve as avatars, and not as a nexus of primary perception and self-identification. Ninety-nine percent of free converts, of course, have no physical bodies at all.

  Finally, Large Arrays of Personalities became possible. The LAP was an individual who copied him- or herself into many separately acting biological bodies and convert copies, spread out over a wide area of space, and discretely stored within the virtuality.

  The grist created the possibility for all of these types to come into being—but without quantum cryptology, that possibility could never have been realized. Why?

  Because quantum cryptology is necessary to the preservation of individuality.

  A biological human body is a tremendous organism of many cells and systems, all working together for the common good of the total animal. Large parts of the body’s chemistry are given over to methods of self-identification. DNA, the immune system, chemical markers on cells—the basic purpose of them all is for the body to know itself. Disease, it can be argued, is a kind of code breaking or natural hacking of these systems. A disease finds a way, usually only temporarily, to trick the body into letting it in, and letting it make use of the body’s resources to feed and propagate.

  Something very much like the immune system was needed if humans were going to be able to “spread out” in the grist and still retain their individuality. How can the various personalities and portions of us brave new humans know for certain that we are communicating with ourselves? How can we be certain that all of our cornucopia of representations are on the same page, working for the same common good? In short: How is it that we maintain absolute self-identity?

  It’s all done with quantum cryptology.

  Let us take the most complicated of the new human types, the Large Array of Personalities. A LAP can spread out wherever the grist allows. You might have an aspect engaging in research in a laboratory on Mercury, another running a resort hotel in a beach barrel along the Dedo, and a third attending a concert by the Bach Metropolitan Philharmonic. In the meantime, you might also have several convert portions trading in stocks and options, and/or in the midst of a high-stakes poker game on one of the gaming merci channels, and/or managing your home, while looking after your pets and children. All of these versions of yourself would very soon become different individuals entirely, just as identical twins are entirely separate individuals, if you were not in constant and instantaneous communication with yourself through the grist. All of us, aspects, free converts, and LAPs, must continually remind ourselves of who we are and that we are. And we must do
so securely, with the absolute knowledge that our personal integrity has not, literally, been compromised.

  Thus, when the grist was first entirely integrated into a human body, with it went an algorithm and mechanism for exchange of information between the various parts of our personalities using, essentially, the same “olive cannon” setup as was described above. Tiny nanophoton generators send coded messages body-to-grist-to-bodyto-convert making our individual personalities, and our intrapersonal communication, in principle impossible to hack.

  These communications are encoded packets that pass instantaneously through the grist. But the code is generated at sublight speed. From this arises a fundamental truth about modern humans: Although we can communicate instantaneously—not faster than light, not faster than anything, but truly instantaneously—through the grist, we cannot exist instantaneously.

  Between aspect and grist pellicle, and convert, there is a tiny, sublight gap. It is a literal gap created by the tiny photon cannon and tiny grates that are built into us as surely as our biological bodies have antibodies and enzymes.

  Attempts were made to create human beings who did not incorporate quantum cryptology. The most famous of those experiments was the creation of the “time towers.” They were LAPs created to experience reality instantly, in the way the grist seemed to promise was possible. Time towers were supposed to experience a year or a decade—or even a century—the way that you and I experience a second. They were supposed to have the perception that the gods might.

  It didn’t work out that way. Instead, they lacked the fundamental ability to know themselves. Almost as quickly as they were created, the time towers split up, became multiple personalities—their many systems and personas mostly at loggerheads with one another. A lucky few—the most famous example being the time tower called Tod—achieved an equilibrium of sorts among their competing personas and thus did not go stark raving mad. But all were, fundamentally, fruitcakes, never able to act in a concerted, individual manner or utter rational, coherent thoughts.