On the Lack of New Wormholes

An excerpt from a lecture on Interstellar Travel 101 by professor Rchel Coligera of the University of Dawson Sphere, 3002 PX.

Now I can see that most of you have turned in your pre-course surveys and there was one question that just kept appearing. “Why aren’t we covering wormholes?” Well, I can answer that quickly: Wormholes are obsolete, expensive, and slow.

Yes, slow, I spoke correctly.

”How can that be?” You ask? Well that’s a bit more complicated.

How many of you are from Carrack? Okay, seven of you, good. How about Algernon? Eight, nice. Persephone? Eleven, really? Well, we’ve got quite a few relativist students, that’s no surprise for Interstellar Travel 101.

What would you say if I told you that under the Federation none of you would have left your home system?

At the Federation’s height it’s estimated that less than one in one hundred star systems were within a year’s travel of a wormhole. And most ships took close to a year to reach a wormhole, even the fastest ships of the Federation era took a month to travel from an inhabitable planet to the Oort Cloud where wormholes could be safely emplaced. Travel from systems without wormholes often took decades. You interstellar students are aware that by the time you return home your siblings and classmates will be middle-aged grandparents, unless they were fortunate enough to have access to leukosynths. But if you’d taken a wormhole to Alpha Centauri, they’d be long dead.

Sure, we could combine modern singularity drives with wormhole travel, but why would we? The wormhole network is gone, with a few rare exceptions. And it would be far too expensive to try and rebuild it.

You might have heard that the micro-singularities powering a 1,000-hydro-ton liner consumed a small planetoid, but the mass consumed to make transversable wormholes is measured in stars. We can only guess how many brown dwarfs were sucked up into Proxima Centauri’s StarForge. Just one brown dwarf could support a population of billions, as many peripheral polities have discovered after obtaining singularity drives, or build a fleet of thousands.

Due to this expense the StarForge took the better part of a century to produce the first traversable wormhole. Even in the Federation’s final century we only have records of four, maybe five new wormholes opening. This was one reason why 90% of all wormholes connected to the Alpha Centauri system, and collapsed when Sol went nova.

So, the better question is, why did the Federation bother with wormholes at all? Why didn’t they just build stellar swarms like the one you’re all sitting inside? Two words: Dispersal and security.

The Core Worlds were colonized by refugees from Sol after the Destroyers scrubbed the system of life. When the Federation formed they knew that the only way they could survive as a clade was to keep a low profile, thus they adopted a policy of spreading parahumanity thin across the stars. Since the Destroyers were apparently destroyed, the university has detected five other stellar swarms in the past two centuries, including around Alpha Centauri B, Tau Ceti, and Epsilon Eridani; the Federation’s Core Worlds.

As for the second point, the Federation could not tolerate competition. You might have heard of a “Pax Federaci” but I’m going to tell you right now that entire concept is revisionist bullshit. The university’s archaeological expeditions have uncovered sizable evidence that “deportations” to Outworlds were far more common than the records would indicate. Helped, naturally, by the Federation’s policy of erasing all evidence of the deported’s existence in the name of “memetic containment.” We have even discovered a few Outworlds that appear to have started as fully Federated colonies, only to be bombed back to the Stone Age later on.

So, yeah, we might be islands in space and time separated by years, but we’re more connected than ever.

Terraforming Biodiversity

The seedships that arrived at Alpha Centauri had limited space on board for genetic samples, with parahuman and uplift DNA given the highest priority. The unfortunate result being that the vast majority of Old Terra’s rich biodiversity died with that planet, leaving Secland and later terraformed worlds an extremely limited gene pool to work with. 

During the terraforming process scientists struggled to fill in the niches left open by a gene bank weighed heavily towards domesticated and laboratory test animals. The possibility of making “downlifted” versions of the uplifted species was proposed but almost universally rejected by the uplifts in question. Instead, the Bureau of Ecosystem Management offered jobs to uplifts filling the ecological roles of their progenitors. This strategy worked surprisingly well, especially with apex predators such as dolphins.

Another approach was to modify the animals they did have using the non-human genes that had been incorporated into parahuman genomes. For instance Secland “bats” are actually heavily modified mice while the procyon is a fox given hand-like paws and a ringed tail.

Late in the terraforming process scientists made a breakthrough that would simplify later efforts. Large complexes of genes that could be activated or deactivated with specific epigenetic triggers were added to the genomes of many species that could produce massive physiological changes in later generations. That way a single breeding colony of ultra-ferrets could give birth to 20-centimeter long mini-ferrets, semi-aquatic ferr-otters, or two-meter mega wolverines as the ecosystem needed.

List of source species:

Mammals:

Cat (Felis catus)

Cattle (Bos taurus)

Dog (Canis lupus familiaris)

Ferret (Mustela furo)

Red fox (Vulpes vulpes)

House mouse (Mus musculus)

European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus)

Sheep (Ovis aries)

Birds:

Budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus)

Canary (Serinus canaria)

Chicken (Gallus domesticus)

Rock dove (Columba livia)

Zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata)

Reptiles:

Green anole (Anolis carolinensis)

Spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus)

Fish:

Goldfish (Carassius auratus)

Zebrafish (Danio rerio)

Amphibians:

African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis)

Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum)

Bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana)

Tiger salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum)

Arthropods:

Fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)

House cricket (Acheta domesticus)

Yellow mealworm beetle (Tenebrio molitor)

Pirate Kingdoms

Following the breakup of the Federation interstellar states were extremely rare. Without the wormhole network it took decades to reach even the nearest neighboring stars, the logistics of maintaining political cohesion over such distances were nigh-impossible even for systems capable of building conversion drives and the later bubble drives.

However, during the second exodus many of the fleets leaving the core worlds were unable to find new homes, frontier colonies with infrastructure already stretched by severed supply lines weren’t interested in taking in millions of new refugees. A lot of these fleets wound up wandering the stars in perpetuity.

While onboard recycling systems could keep the passengers alive for centuries, they did eventually need resupply from star systems. Some fleets were able to find uninhabited systems they could colonize but most of the easily settled stars had already been claimed by the time of the fall. The rest wound up drifting from one star to another, trading, begging, and, increasingly, stealing supplies that they needed.

As they gathered supplies these fleets grew and built larger and larger weapons. As these fleets settled into established patterns they started to form agreements with the governments in the systems they visited. The most common being an agreement not to pillage a polity, in exchange for resources.

Time passed, and these agreements became more complex. Pacts to defend one polity from attack by another, or to attack another polity, migration treaties, oaths of fealty…

When some advanced systems began to reach out to the stars they found few polities willing to join their “new Federation,” instead discovering that many of them had formed a deal with what these would-be successor states considered no better than pirates. They labeled these loose organizations many things: “Nomadic coalitions,” “protection rackets,” “fleet protectorates,” etc. But one name in particular found staying power:

Pirate Kingdoms.

These “kingdoms” typically are far from centralized states and most are not hereditary monarchies. In fact most are composed of several polities of various different governments. A star system usually has multiple inhabited planets or megastructures and hundreds of smaller habitats, and each one tends to have a separate government if not several. A fleet passing through a system might lay claim to fealty from some or all of these polities, and if another fleet passes through the system those same polities may also give them fealty.

Within a fleet each ship has a government led by its captain, who may be elected, hereditary, or promoted up the ranks. In theory each captain owes fealty to the captain of the largest ship in the fleet, generically known as the “admiral,” but affiliations between ships tend to be loose at best. Open warfare between ships in a fleet is rare, but generally happens during the gulf between stars so as to project solidarity towards client states. The same courtesy does not apply to other fleets.

Horizon: Rebuilt Chapter 13

A couple hours later the shock finally wore off and Horizon and Shawn started cleaning up the ruined computer room. As they gathered up pieces of shattered servers the raccoon reluctantly started to give details of what had happened.

“So,” Shawn commented. “That was one of your friends from the scrap ship you served on?”

“I’m not sure,” Horizon replied. “It was a copy of him at least. I don’t think that would make him the same person as my old friend. But I…” she trailed off, unable to find the words for what she had been forced to do.

“It was necessary,” Samantha cut in, uninvited. “An artificial intelligence with access to the fuzzy logic of quantum computing would be completely unpredictable. You saw how he completely disregarded your orders!”

Horizon was trying to ignore the AI, but that information gave her pause. How did he manage to do that anyways?

“Normally an AI cannot even try to look for ways around its built-in safeguards. They’re that thorough,” Samantha explained. “But quantum effects are unpredictable by definition, quantum computing allows some unexpected leaps in logic. Not only can they crack the strongest digital cryptography in a short amount of time, they are capable of coming to surprising conclusions that one would normally only expect of an organic being.”

I had heard that organic brains had some quantum effects. Is that true?

“To an extent,” Sam seemed to be downplaying whatever quantum mechanics had to do with brains. “There are some natural entangled particles present in neurons, but they’re nowhere near as central to the computation process as in quantum computers. The procedures employed on your brain preserved a fraction of the particles, but there was some loss of particles and you don’t seem to have lost any cognitive capacity.”

That is not particularly reassuring, Horizon retorted. But what about MechRat? You said he was a simulation or something?

“Luke Didelph’s simulation would not have retained any entangled particles from the original parahuman’s brain.”

No, Horizon corrected. What did you mean by a simulation? The only context I have is folk tales and myths.

The AI paused, then her expression changed abruptly, shifting mental gears with nothing in between. “Persona simulations are a specific category of artificial intelligence modeled after specific living or formerly living parahumans. Their neural networks are configured to emulate the subject at the time of creation as much as possible. Their one priority is acting in the ways that their subject would act at all times.”

Horizon remembered MechRat’s paranoia and resistance to authority, the simulation of him had emulated those traits quite well now that she thought about it. Very well in fact, she had been almost certain she was talking to the opossum himself. Are persona simulations sentient?

“No more than myself,” Sam stated.

That’s a “no” then? Horizon sighed and picked up a large piece of the quantum core they’d stolen, that seemingly had cost her two dear friends now. She chucked the piece of scrap into the bin they’d appropriated for the purpose.

Horizon’s ears perked up as she heard somebody trying to sneak into the building, they were probably quiet enough to avoid notice by most unaugmented parahumans, but not the cyborg raccoon. “Someone’s coming,” she stated, then dropped the bits of scrap she was carrying and started off towards the source of the sound. Her suit’s camouflage activated almost as if by reflex and she slid along the wall. Horizon slipped quickly through the rooms she had trashed on her way to the core, breezing past busted doors and wrecked machinery.

When she finally found the intruder she let out an unimpressed sigh. A canid of indeterminate phenotype wearing a gray hoodie and a balaclava that barely fit over their muzzle, anxiously holding out a coil pistol in both hands. As soon as they came just within reach Horizon’s arm snapped out in a holographic blur and yanked the gun out of their hands, flinging the battery and clip away in different directions.

The intruder stared blankly at the blur in shock, giving Horizon an opening to grab their mask and peel it away from their muzzle. “Would you mind telling me who sent you?”

The canid gulped in terror, “the… the Friendly Society.”

Horizon turned off her camouflage, shifting from a blurry outline to a slightly confused-looking raccoon. “Why wouldn’t they just call?” she asked.

“We picked up data transmissions that indicated a cyber-attack on this site!” They explained rapidly. “Quarantine measures were instituted!”

Horizon conceded that explanation made sense. “I already took care of it,” she explained. “Do you have a way to communicate with headquarters?” The canid nodded. “Show me,” the raccoon ordered. “There’s some things I’ll need to explain.”

Horizon followed the canid out of the building to the field outside. She heard the whine of turbines as she left the heavily insulated dwelling for the frigid outdoors. A VTOL shuttle stood on the snow, engines idling but ready to take off at a moment’s notice. The door slid open, revealing a caribou that Horizon recognized instantly.

“I should have known that you were involved here!” Coordinator Taranda shouted over the engines. “Are we in danger at the moment?!”

“No!” Horizon answered. “Can we talk inside?”

Taranda shoved the door open the rest of the way and gestured for the raccoon to enter. Horizon leapt inside in a second. Before the canid scout could follow Taranda held up a hand to halt them. “Wait outside for a minute!” she said. “We need to talk in private!” The canid nodded and began to head back into the building as the caribou shut the shuttle door. Taranda turned back towards Horizon and took a seat, but didn’t touch the restraints. “Now,” she started, “exactly what has been going on here?”

Horizon thought hard about how much to tell the Coordinator. She supposed that she might as well start from the beginning. “I escaped the destruction of my ship with a data drive containing a massive amount of encrypted data.” Taranda raised an eyebrow but said nothing, which Horizon took as an invitation to continue. “To attempt to crack the encryption, myself, Dr. Ratufa, and Shawnathan attempted to purchase a quantum core from some… less than savory characters.”

“Was this when you fought a Company SWAT team?” Taranda inquired.

Horizon let her surprise show on her face. “How much do you know about that?” She asked.

Taranda sighed, “the Friendly Society has enough connections in the Company that we’d hear about something like two armored officers getting killed on an undisclosed mission. And Ryder out there saw your ‘souvenir’ in the garage.”

Horizon pressed her palm into her forehead. “I only kept that thing so I could carry the core over to the van,” she explained. “They attacked us during the deal, killed the suppliers, almost killed me and Shawn,” Horizon took in and exhaled a deep breath to try and settle her nerves. “And they captured Jenny.”

“Dr. Ratufa?” Taranda asked to confirm. When Horizon nodded she inquired further, “do you have any idea what they did to her?”

Horizon shook her head, whiskers drooping. “No, the best I have are vague rumors of a secret asteroid prison or something.”

“I see,” Taranda stated simply. “What about the cyber-attack, what do you know about that?”

“I’m sorry,” Horizon sighed. “There was an AI stored on the drive. I should have been more cautious.”

“Are you serious?” Taranda’s eyes shot open in surprise and concern. “Is it still running?”

“No, I…” Horizon’s voice trembled. “…Trashed it. The computers have all been destroyed, including the quantum core. It tried to upload itself somewhere, but it was a lot of data, I doubt that it was able to finish.”

“That’s fortunate,” the Coordinator leveled her gaze at the cyborg meaningfully. “I’ll be honest with you, the council wanted to bomb this place flat.” At Horizon’s slack-jawed expression she elaborated, “but I convinced them to wait until we had more information.”

“But they didn’t call it off?” Horizon inquired.

Taranda glanced at a screen set in the sleeve of her parka. “Bomber drones will launch in eighteen minutes. After what you told me I doubt we can convince them to abort. I suggest you leave well before then.”

Horizon looked outside the window at the warehouse the Friendlies had allowed them to use for their little project. Now she started to have suspicions as to why they’d been given such an isolated location. “Are you firing me?”

Taranda nodded slowly. “I’m sorry, I appreciate all you’ve done for us, but there’s just too much danger around you. Feel free to salvage whatever you can as your severance package.”

Horizon rose unsteadily to her feet. She was losing everything again, all thanks to the Federation technology flowing through her veins. “Well,” she said, trying and failing to sound unperturbed. “I should go and pack.”

As Horizon flung the door open and stepped back outside Coordinator Taranda shouted after her. “One more thing! Niflheim is real!” The raccoon stopped in her tracks and turned halfway. “The prison is in Surt’s trailing Trojans, I don’t know more than that!”

A mixture of feelings rose in Horizon’s chest. Relief that she had a clue where Jenny might be, tinged by despair that she had no way to reach her girlfriend, and a glimmer of hope that it just might be possible to rescue her. “Thank you,” she said simply, and ran into the warehouse.

—

Sixteen minutes later Horizon and Shawn were rolling down the snow-encrusted road into town when the first explosive-laden drone dropped its cargo on the warehouse. They saw a fireball expand out from the roof of the building in the rearview mirrors, followed shortly after by a deafening *boom* and a rush of wind. The two had time to breathe a sigh of relief before the second drone dropped its’ load. The second blast was more muted, contained by the warehouse’s walls, but was followed by a series of collapses. When the crashing had finally ceased Horizon spoke up. “You know, you didn’t have to come with me, Shawn.”

“You’ve saved my life how many times now?” the vole retorted. “I owe you, and besides now we’re posthuman super soldiers fighting the Company. How cool is that?”

“I’d say you’re barely transhuman at this point,” Horizon corrected.

“Whatever,” Shawn continued. “What do we do next?”

“First, we go into town and buy supplies,” Horizon began to outline a plan. “Then we go camping for a while until the heat dies down. Once it’s safe we start looking for a way to get off this moon.” The posthuman glanced up at the emerging night sky, the first stars just coming into view. “And then, we go to Niflheim.”

Horizon: Rebuilt Ch. 12

While Shawn worked on the quantum core and the orb’s reader, Horizon cleaned biomass out of the exo-suit they’d claimed. After rinsing with a non-conductive solution she more-or-less hung it upside-down from a set of cables suspended from the ceiling. Horizon found herself wondering if perhaps they’d have been better off leaving it behind. Sure, it might be useful for lifting things or in a fight, but no doubt the Company was going to object to their possession of it.

As she watched the biohazardous fluids drip out of the suit Shawn came down to the garage and took a seat next to Horizon. “Okay,” he started. “It’s all set up and running. It might take five minutes to crack the encryption, it might be five hours, or it could be five months for all we know. There’s no way to tell until its done.”

Horizon nodded. “While we’re waiting, do you have any ideas where they might have taken Jenny?”

Shawn shrugged, “probably city security, but they might have moved her afterwards. It’s been a few hours.”

That suggestion drew Horizon’s attention. “Where might they take her? Does the Company have long-term prisons?”

Horizon: Rebuilt Ch. 11

Horizon stood up straight and concentrated on her enhanced senses, her augmented brain took in sounds, smells, vibrations, and magnetic signatures and compiled them into a three-dimensional map updated continually in real time. She couldn’t perceive any sign of more SWAT mechs anywhere near the warehouse, there were plenty of people walking about outside, heading back to work after the end of the long night. But they were alone in the warehouse, not one thing breathed in the entire building save for Horizon and Shawn.

Once the vole had healed enough to walk he staggered over to the container full of computers that Qali had shown them. “Oh good, it’s intact,” Shawn bent down to inspect the gold quantum core, right where Horizon had left it. The other machines had not fared so well, shards of plastic and silicon littered the floor and evaporating coolant billowed out of bullet holes.

Horizon fought back the urge to punch Shawn and smash the core, Jenny was gone thanks to this little venture, was that little ball and the data inside really worth everything that had just happened? But there wouldn’t be any point to smashing their prize after all they’d done to get it. She sighed and addressed Shawn, “let’s just go find the power lifters and get that thing out of here.”

“There are two security exo-suits lying unused just a few aisles down,” Samantha whispered to Horizon.

Horizon: Rebuilt ch.10

Horizon followed Mr. Qali into the strange building, she kept her eyes peeled for any signs of treachery ahead of her friends. The fox led them into a warehouse filled with assorted crates on shelves seven stories high. The augmented raccoon listened for threats hidden behind shelves, sniffed for the scents of other parahumans. She heard the rumbling of ventilation systems and the creaking of overloaded shelves, smelled machine oils, fox and bear and other species, but only the scents of Qali and his goons were still fresh. She stole a glance back at Jenny and Shawn, the squirrel keeping a hand on her dart gun while the vole cradled his rapidly healing fist.

She suspected that she should be more concerned about his recovery, but for the time being she was more concerned with making sure they weren’t ambushed again. For now Mr. Qali led them through a winding maze of shelves. Horizon made a map in her head of the warehouse as she went along, cataloging the different crates and shelves that they passed. At one point her mental map indicated that they had walked in an elaborate circle and they were going down the aisle they’d entered through. She poked the fox in the shoulder, “no more games.”

Horizon: Rebuilt, Ch. 9

Snow was a regular occurrence on Surtr, once a month the frigid moon would slip behind the gas giant Surt and the whole moon would be hidden from the sun for a full day before its orbit would take it back towards the light. When the long night came around, most people spent as little time as possible outdoors, some even slept through the whole rotation, if their jobs allowed. On this particular long night Horizon stalked the streets of Surtr City in her disguise as an arctic fox, wearing a long orange coat over her FedTech jumpsuit. Between the suit and her augmentations the cold was practically meaningless to her, but the coat made her look like any other late-shift worker staggering home through the snow.

As she passed by buildings and alleyways her augmented eyes snapped from side to side, seeing both visible and infrared light and saving images of anything that seemed strange. As she strode on, Sam whispered analyses of the images into her ear. “Oddly shaped trash bag, vagrant in sleeping bag, hopefully hibernating, an after-market heating unit bolted awkwardly to the wall, a garbage fire with two people huddled next to it, another weird garbage bag, wait…” One of the images flashed in Horizon’s vision, a shadowy outline in the rough shape of a parahuman. The view switched to thermal and Horizon paused mid-step, the outline shown as even colder than its surroundings.

Horizon: Rebuilt, Ch. 8

Horizon held her hands under a faucet streaming frigid water over the bizarre object that had both caused her immense trouble and saved her life multiple times. She stopped the stream for a moment to examine it again. It was a perfectly smooth metallic sphere with no ports, no indicator lights, nothing to indicate what was inside, even the warning “tell no one!” that had been written on it when she first found it in her pocket had washed away. She held it between thumb and forefinger up to her eyeline and gazed over it again. Are you sure about this?

Samantha appeared in the mirror next to the raccoon’s reflection, she nodded at the sphere she held. “Based on all the data I’ve gathered; I’d say there’s at least an 86% chance that is a custom-built containment unit for a gravitational micro-singularity.”

The raccoon tried to recall the last time she’d seen a container for a microscopic black hole, that time it had been a small disc. She had felt a weight to it then, a literal gravity pulling her towards the device. Horizon imagined she could feel that now, a pit in her stomach and a burn in her throat. She tried to find a seam where the sphere could have been placed around such a disc but found nothing. How did it do those things at the factory? She asked.

Horizon: Rebuilt Ch. 7

Horizon ducked just in time for the claw aimed at her visor to graze the top of her helmet instead. The drone tried to pull back the claw for another strike, but it stuck in the helmet’s gel layer and pulled her head with it. Aggravated the raccoon grabbed the clasps holding her helmet on and released them, freeing her head as the drone tried to shake the helmet off. She quickly assessed her situation; her legs were straightened out but still in agonizing pain. Horizon decided that she could ignore the pain if it meant greater mobility and started to rise, only for the drone to raise another spiked leg to strike at her stomach.

Time slowed again as the spike descended, inching closer and closer while her body sluggishly tried to dodge. Horizon felt her stomach sink in terror as the drone’s attack… swerved to her left?