The Quantum Connection

CHAPTER 30

We would often host the W-squared core group down at the beach house for weeks at a time. The kids would play with the dogs on the beach and the adults would sit around and drink too much and talk about our history and various philosophies and the possibilities of future alien threats.

We were sitting around the patio fireplace looking up at the stars one evening, discussing the status of the public SETI program and how wrong the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence scientists had been.

"I always thought it was silly for the SETI guys to look only at a small band of wavelengths for signals of such mammoth proportion that a magically advanced species would have to have designed it for us and pointed it directly at us," Anson said as he held an empty beer bottle in his hand. The beer bottle morphed into a model of a radio telescope and then into a little red devil and then it turned back into a bottle of beer—now it was full.

"You know, I've never really thought about it before, but since the Grays and the red devils have been in control of the galaxy for so long, there aren't any radio signals out there to detect," I said.

"That's right." Tabitha sat down between Anson's legs and leaned back on him in the lounge chair. "As far as we can tell they use only the Infrastructure communication systems. No radio or microwave or optical systems have been found at all except for the energy transmission to the nanomachines. They only do that for a few meters and at extremely low power signals."

"Yeah, you're right, Tab. And that's just the Gray's nanomachines. Since the Lumpeyins use the miniature warp bubbles in the Dr. Who's phone booth configuration, they could put little SuperAgents in there and control them through the Infrastructure," 'Becca said.

"Hey! 'Bec, that is probably exactly how those things work. The Infrastructure transceivers in the picophage warp bubbles are probably low-level SuperAgents," Tatiana said.

"We'll have to consider that. That might give us an edge on stopping that damned picophage ahead of schedule," Anson said. He was already on another beer.

"I hate to change the subject back to where we were a few minutes ago, but," Jim said, "what about the quarantined aliens? They would most likely use radio signals. I'll bet you with the Solar Focus telescope we could pick up their signals."

"Why would we want to do that, Jim? We can just take the Phoenix and fly over and see them anytime we desire. No speed-of-light worries," I replied.

"Just for the hell of it and to prove that we were right about the SETI folks. Then if we find the signals we could figure out a way to detect them from public radio observatories." Jim was getting excited.

"Hey, I see where you are going here. If we can point the idiots in the right direction and find a real E.T. signal then we will have shown the public that there are indeed aliens out there. A great start in the informing of the general public process," Tabitha added.

"Well, that too." Jim smirked. "But I was thinking more along the lines of showing those Utopians up. Why can't our team be the one that goes public with the observation? It would show those guys up, big time."

"Hayul fahr! I like it!" Anson said.

"Honey . . ." 'Becca smiled. "You're still pissed that you didn't get to go to M.I.T. aren't you?" Rebecca let out an intoxicated giggle.

"Hey, we did the work. We ought to go in the history books somewhere." Jim sounded a little irked. "Hell, Anson invented the first warp drive and flew us out to other worlds and enabled us to have a first real defense against would-be alien attackers. Stevie and Tatiana over there stole and redesigned alien technologies that have revolutionized the way that we think about the universe. And all of our efforts combined have enabled us to become one of the most powerful species in the galaxy! Or at least powerful enough to hold off alien invasions."

That evening we decided to start working on a plan to get radio telescope time at Arecibo. Tabitha and Annie were going to work that through NASA and Air Force channels. Anson, Rebecca, and Jim were going to use the Solar Focus telescope to find radio signals from the various quarantined planets. Tatiana and I first bounced out to each of these systems in the Phoenix to determine which ones were in a technological age; otherwise, the search at the Solar Focus telescope would have taken a lot longer.

All said and done it took us about six months to pick the right candidates, detect them from space, determine how to modify the receivers at the large dish in Arecibo, and then to get dish time there. We all took a two-week vacation in Puerto Rico and spent all of that time in the radio telescope facility on top of the mountain. We had everything set up and ready to go in a matter of a couple days because the nanomachines facilitated the equipment upgrade process very quickly. In fact, there were a few times where we had trouble explaining to the facilities officer how we had changed some things so quickly.

We just told him that we had plenty of budget and that we were really good at what we did. He didn't like that response until Annie came around and told him to stop asking questions or she would have him removed from the facility. When the fellow protested that she couldn't have him removed, Annie had him removed just to prove the point. She let him back in two days later after he promised to behave himself. Besides, we had detected one of the quarantined civilizations the day before and we wanted there to be witnesses. We found a whole bunch of communications signals at about thirty-two gigahertz. They were very low power and required state-of-the-art amplifiers, but we could detect them. We also, miraculously, discovered signals around five other star systems. The radio astronomers and SETI folks hanging around the facility couldn't believe what they were seeing.

A week later, when we announced it on the international news channels, the world couldn't believe it. SETI had been at it for so long with no luck that the general public never really expected them to find anything. The announcement was made and we were all interviewed to a great extent. We all made a big point about the fact that we weren't considered part of the typical SETI community. We all got a big laugh out of that and we also all got to offer our opinions as to what types of aliens there might be out there. Here is when we really showed how different we were from the SETI folks.

We made it very obvious that we thought that the possibility that these aliens might come and give us the cure for cancer was ridiculous and it was more likely that they would want to come and eat us, or something equally unpleasant. There were a few heated debates with some of the academic community but Jim and Anson and Tabitha and 'Becca really held their own. They truly were brilliant and it was a good thing that they were on our side. After about three more years of this debate and fun, we had to go back to our real jobs—defending the planet. The damned Grays had finally decided that they would make another attempt at overtaking humanity. But we had been preparing for them all along.

There had been nearly five years with no word from the Grays except for border skirmishes along the edge of the quarantine zone. So we decided we had better spread out as best we could while we could. After all, we figured it would be harder tactically to destroy many worlds as opposed to just one.

We took complete groups of volunteers and all the materials we could muster and warped them through the quantum connection and the Infrastructure to all of the habitable worlds within the quarantine zone. We warped a complement of retrofitted alien spaceships through the Infrastructure to each of the outpost colonies. After all, we could make the inside of the warp bubble pretty much as large as we wanted to. We even warped some closed-down military facilities from Earth through to some of the outpost worlds. We took ghost towns, trailer parks, condemned shopping malls, you name it. We only took things in the middle of the night and even then we were seldom without witnesses. We would either recruit the witnesses or pay them off. We always had construction crews working the place the next morning so nobody was the wiser. Oh, there was some talk on the Internet about it but only on the crackpot sites. After all, there were no such things as UFOs and alien abductions. And there never would be again!

Once we placed a SuperAgent on each of the outpost planets we could quantum connect basically anything between any two SuperAgent locations. Our population and presence in space were growing. Our recruitment program back on Earth was put into high gear and we picked up as many volunteers as possible. With the inflow of technology and the rapid nanomachine production at the "diamond factory," we were able to offer high wages to any new volunteers. We had reached nearly forty outpost worlds and now had a fleet of more than a thousand retrofitted spacecraft with superfast quantum fluctuation drives and humanized SuperAgents. It was all kept so "above Top Secret" and compartmentalized that if you weren't "in the know" then you weren't "in the know."

Our plan was to spread out and build up as big an empire as we possibly could so we could have a better chance at defending ourselves if the aliens came. We all knew that one day soon they would come. Be prepared! Since each new outpost might be vulnerable, we made sure there was always at least one contingent of Phoenix-class ships and SuperAgent-carrying warp-armored soldiers.

We had hoped the ship full of dead aliens we returned to them would give them the hint to not come back and that we were a species they didn't want to mess with. But we soon found that they had not forgotten about us.

Perhaps they had been investigating and studying the ship that we had returned to them to determine how we had beaten them so easily, but I don't think they figured it out. But this time they were very serious and sent a fleet of not a thousand vessels but one hundred thousand vessels. We again detected their approach long before they ever reached the quarantined zone. Since they never figured out how to keep us out of the alien Framework that they had laid in place on top of the universal Infrastructure, we could monitor their whereabouts fairly easily. It seemed obvious that we were much more suited for warfare than the Grays—they just weren't being devious and clever enough and we had had millennia of being forced into warfare due to the Lumpeyin Himbroozya picophage. We were good at warfare when we needed to be and Opolawn's prodding us along hadn't hurt us in that regards. Perhaps a hive collective works in such a way that their response is too sluggish to be good at warfare, I don't know for sure. I just know that we were better, smarter, and we kicked their little Gray asses.

The alien attack force was much more overwhelming this time, so we had to use a combination of the quantum teleportation and plain old space warfare ship-to-ship fighting, but we beat the socks off of them again because we could zip in and out of any of their spaceships. In the past five years of preparation for an alien attack fleet we had produced many more SuperAgents and drafted many more worthy Slash-and-Burn operatives, and we had also captured a lot more alien ships. Since we had never left a survivor in previous conflicts with the Grays they still didn't know how we were getting around within their fleet, and they were helpless. We zipped in and out of their fleet vessels like untouchable gods with unimaginable powers.

We saw them coming and hit them way out before they reached the old quarantine zone. This battle went slower just due to the size of it, but it never once turned against us. We knew what needed to be done and we set about doing it. While conducting the ship-to-ship fighting we discovered that enough squeeze-play warp missiles could force the alien degenerate-matter-hull spaceships into small black holes and that the subsequently formed singularities were unstable and soon went supernova. This actually had a positive effect on the tide of the battle. Once we found out what would happen, we forced a squeeze play in the middle of their fleet. The alien ship shrunk inward on itself until it became a singularity for a few seconds. The singularity's event horizon was small, but it did poke a neat hole clean through the next ship in its path. And then the thing went supernova and splattered ten of the ships around it and disrupted the fleet's formation. We did this repeatedly and in a well-orchestrated manner and the technique worked tremendously well in creating chaos in the alien tactics. We had learned a considerable amount about space warfare and tactics over the past five or so years and it was showing. We had fun with that weapon.

Tatiana and I stayed on board the Phoenix this go around, but according to the combat teams, the ship-to-ship fighting was nowhere near as much of a thrill as popping inside an alien ship and completely taking the Grays by surprise and in a matter of seconds, the ship completely from them. Our standard mode of operation was still to leave no Grays standing, sitting, or breathing. We couldn't risk the possibility that one of the witness Grays would figure out how we got on board their ships. Although we believed and still do believe that to be unlikely, as there is no way that they could actually see us and detect what we were doing at such a small scale once we shrunk down and entered the SuperAgent Infrastructure's quantum connection.

This time it took our fleet of thirty-three hundred and nine vessels and our warp-armored SuperAgent-toting infantry two hours and twenty minutes or so to completely halt the alien fleet's advance and another thirty minutes or so making sure that there were no alien survivors left. We discovered that about fifty percent of the alien fleet carried Prawmitoos's FUER and we guessed that was with hopes of igniting the Earth and blowing us asunder. Now we have the FUER and will soon be able to reverse engineer it. Like I said before, the Grays are stupid and not very good at warfare. Or again, perhaps, we are just really good at it.

After the battle had ceased we sent them a hundred ships full of dead Grays and on each of the vessels we used the nanomachines to inscribe in bold, shiny letters the Teytoonise version of the sign at the gates of Hades: abandon all hope ye who enter here! We've been fighting the war against the aliens, Grays and Lumpeyins, on more than just one front. We've also been studying the dormant picophage. Since we had let the general public know that these civilizations existed, sooner or later they would want to communicate with these folks and we hoped to be able to communicate with them safely. With our near-infinite budget from the rare commodities and the other classified endeavors that the nanomachines enabled us to create, we ramped up a huge research effort on the picophage cure—not just for the quarantined aliens but for us as well. Anson developed a means of monitoring the phage devices on the picometer scale and mapping their whereabouts. There were some suggestions on the table presently about being able to capture the individual picophages with the same type of warp bubbles that we use to traverse the Infrastructure. These bubbles are much smaller than the picophage is and if we could drive through and into a quantum connected datastream there was no reason to believe that we couldn't fly around and capture all of these picometer devices. That would happen soon. Then we would have a cure and could go and infect the quarantined races with the cure. We couldn't believe the Grays never thought of this, but then again they used mainly quantum technologies, not general relativistic ones.

If we cured these other civilizations it would put another burden on us, though. At the same time we would also have to protect them from the Grays or they would wipe them out—we believed Opolawn when he told us the Grays believed they were The Species and would devour any others in their path. In the meantime we had every intention of stopping all alien abductions on these worlds and letting them live their lives under their own power. Our plan was to do all of this without letting the local inhabitants ever know we were there. If they call out to us to see if we are here, we planned to answer then, but only then. There have been enough meddlers in this galaxy's history.