Ivan Kal - Olympus

Just as he finished the report, his second, Nadia pinged him and informed him that Seo-yun wanted to speak to him, he told her to send her in.

A moment later Seo-yun walked in, she had her hair tied in a knot on top of her head, and was holding a datapad in her hand, it was amusing to Tomas how most of those who were born before the age of implants had tendency to review information on their datapads rather than their implants.

“Hello Seo-yun, I have just finished reading your report on the Alpha Centauri mission.” Tomas said.

“Hi, well, I have something even more exciting to show you now.” She sat down on the chair in front of his desk, they had abandoned any formality between them a long time ago. She smiled brightly, with a mischievous glint in her eyes.

Tomas raised an eyebrow. “More monumental than a trip to another star system?”

“Oh yes, much more.” She said.

Intrigued, Tomas motioned for her to continue.

“I have two things to tell you, I waited until we were sure about both of them, it was coincidence that the final test results came within a day of each other.” She said. Tomas knew that Seo-yun had a lot of experiments going on, and that she didn’t bring them to him until they were successful. He kept silent and waited for her to tell him more.

“First, we have been experimenting on faster than light communications, there were some mentions of it in the alien databases, but the data was too corrupted to be recovered, but it helped us by telling us that FTL comms were possible. So we threw ourselves on the problem. First idea we had was to use hyperspace capable comm drones, but since ships or in this case drones can only enter hyperspace when they were sufficiently away from a star’s influence we rejected it, but kept it as a possibility for communication between star systems. Then we got the idea to use gravity. We had discovered that gravity propagates at the speed substantially faster than the speed of light, when we were developing artificial gravity generators. But our understanding of gravity is not yet large enough to pull it off efficiently, we don’t have a power source strong enough to create a gravity pulse focused and strong enough to reach any distance that would be of use to us. So after these failures we tried to follow more abstract and unconventional paths. We tried speeding up the light, at which we of course failed.” She grinned. “We played with the concept of micro wormholes, but decided that at our current level we weren’t proficient enough to pull that off safely, if at all. And then we went back to hyperspace, we know that the law in hyperspace are different than in regular space. We studied the laws of hyperspace and finally discerned that the reason ships can only enter hyperspace when the stars influence was low enough has to do with the mass of the object trying to enter the space. After an object with mass passes certain point of gravitation pull on it, it can safely pass through the barrier between regular space and hyperspace, if it tried to enter hyperspace while the gravitation pull on it was above that point, the gravity would hamper it, and it wouldn’t achieve, for the lack of a better word enough “thrust” to be pushed through the barrier, resulting in it being destroyed. Theoretically one could enter hyperspace within a star system, but it would require insane amount of energy, the closer to the sun you are the more energy you would need, while after it crosses the “passing point” the amount of energy drops off sharply. So after we learned this we set on to find a way to pass communications through hyperspace. We discovered that if we send a charged luxon particles, particles that move at the speed of light, into hyperspace they became tachyons, particles that move faster than the speed of light, and move in the direction they were moving prior to entering hyperspace until they run out of charge. So we devised a way to send information with these particles, we devised computers that can interpret the information once tachyons leave hyperspace and become luxon particles again. So now we have FTL or rather near instantaneous communications, the lag is so small that it is negligible, with a few little problems, one is that the communications are instantaneous in the range of 50 light years, after that the tachyons lose speed rapidly, even if they are still charged, but it will still be much faster communication than anything else. The lag increases substantially after 50 ly point. But we won’t need to worry about that for a long time, we even have some ideas that could effectively remove the problems, we could place rerouting stations that would receive the communication and then relay it for another 50 ly, if we ever need to communicate over such vast distances. The other problem are the calculations required to send the communication on target, the math is abysmal, the biggest problem is that space, our galaxy even is in constant motion, while hyperspace is not, and as such we need to calculate the amount of charge the communication needs, then the coordinates of the receiver, as they will be after the communication exits hyperspace. The only computers that are able to calculate this are our most advanced quantum computers, and only those that have an Ai in them, the Ai’s ability to manage multitude of problems simultaneously lowers the margin of error to barley 0.001%”

Tomas raised his hand. “Wait. Why can’t a quantum computer do the calculations without the Ai?” He said.

Seo-yun grimaced. “It can, but an ordinary software can’t do it as precise as an Ai can. The Ai’s have the ability to coordinate and use quantum computer’s assets in such a way to increase its capabilities by a factor of 12. We have still not been able to figure out why.” She said. Tomas saw that their inability to find the cause of the increase in ability was annoying her. She had never liked unsolved puzzles, it was one of the reasons he hired her, and showed her the alien ship so many years ago.

Tomas sighed. “Alright, I know that you feel that the Ai pose no threat, if they are treated right, but I still want you to be careful. The aliens shackled their Ai’s for a reason, and I don’t want us to make any mistakes.” He said while looking Seo-yun in the eyes. She held his glare, and was about to say something when she changed her mind and nodded.

“Good, that is an amazing discovery, and I have no doubt that it will be remembered in the history books, but you said you have one more thing to tell me. I doubt that it could be more amazing than what I just heard” Tomas said.

Seo-yun’s expression immediately changed from serious to amused, which immediately told Tomas that he was wrong, this will be even more amazing.

“I so enjoy to prove you wrong.” Seo-yun said while smiling and batting her eyelashes at him, which in turn made him smile with her.

“Go on then, prove me wrong.” Tomas said.

“Well, you know that we got a lot of medical knowledge from the alien ship.” She said, and Tomas nodded. “Well, the knowledge itself was worthless to us, as it was all about alien physiology, so it was of low importance, but one of our geneticist was looking through it in his spare time, and something he saw in there, on one of the races that the Union encountered gave him an idea. So he worked on it in his spare time for the past few years, until finally a year ago he had a breakthrough. He went to his team leader and showed her his work, and she in turn showed it to me. I gave her the permission to focus all our available resources on it, and then we had another breakthrough a few months ago. The final test results came in yesterday, so now it is confirmed. We have been able to create an artificial gene, that when introduced into human DNA, causes our cells to stop decaying, stop dying, in other words it stops entropy. With this gene we can remove death. Each one of us with this gene, will live forever, barring that we don’t have a violent death or die from disease.” Seo-yun said grinning.