Crystal Futures

"Grandpa you created this world, so why do you hide from it?"

Sophie, a bright blue-eyed eighteen-year-old blonde, looked earnestly into her grandfather's eyes and her interest seemed genuine to him.

Since I founded Crystal Connections Incorporated, and she is my granddaughter, maybe today, I will tell her the truth about the world I created- someone has to know for when I am gone, he thought, if I have to tell my story then why not to her.

He continued out loud.

"Would you like to hear a story? Something the Crystal AI will never tell you."

"Good!", said Sophie, clapping her hands together and sitting down next to her Grandpa.

"As a great man once said, 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy'. When I was born there was no instant communication between worlds and there were no crystal portals."

"But you invented the crystals and changed all that didn't you Grandpa?" said Sophie admiringly.

Grandpa saw the rest of the family now gathered, around the couch, where he and Sophie sat, attentively sipping their drinks, as they listened in on the conversation.

This is definitely the place to say these things.

The grand windows, of the space yacht, opened out on to a vista of the great domed garden city - Lunar City, on the far side of the earth's moon, that lay below them, built into a giant, deep, crater supposedly created by an asteroid strike just forty years ago.

"The space-time crystals have always existed, it was other people who discovered them and started to realize their possibilities."

"Why were they so special?" asked Sophie.

Grandpa drew a massive diamond out of his pocket showing it to Sophie.

"This diamond is old, as old as creation itself, and it has a crystalline structure. Somehow all the tiny atoms, that go in such a beautiful object, arranged themselves, equally spaced to form this structure. You can see that light passes through it and you can see that it is hard."

He gave the diamond to Sophie and she felt it.

"This diamond has not changed over the millennia, but time crystals are different. They are always changing. They have complex patterns that continually repeat. Most of the quantum computing developments and crystal portal techniques, I have invented, were derived from time crystals."

"So they are like liquid diamonds, always changing," said Sophie, delightedly.

"Yes, that is one way to describe them. The problem with 'liquid diamonds' is that eventually, they lose coherence or indeed melt and so we had to find a way to stabilize their dynamic structures, which I did with magnetic fields that stabilized the patterns."

"Mum and dad told me this much, but Grandpa what they have never been able to explain is why this means we can speak to the colonists on Proxima B in Proxima Centauri, or to Martians in real-time, or why we can step into one of your crystal portals and appear somewhere else, billions of miles away, instantaneously"

"Well this is where it gets more complicated, have you ever heard of Quantum Entanglement?"

"No"

"Well imagine my time crystals repeating pattern is a perfect circle, going round and round, at an even speed."

"OK"

"Now imagine another identical time crystal, on another world, also rotating that perfect circle, at the same speed."

"OK"

"Well, we found a way to connect the two patterns. We found that the rotating patterns themselves were independent of all energy considerations and were not electromagnetic, so they did not produce a lot heat as many older computers did and distance did not matter."

"So if you had two of these magic crystals you could synchronize them across the galaxy."

"Yes though initially, we were far less ambitious. We used this distance independent synchronicity to build quantum computers, employing the time crystal patterns, as complex logic gateways with trillions of qubits of capacity doing immensely complex calculations. We found a lot of the early crystals became unstable, too early, and so the computers melted or lost meaningful coherence, quite rapidly. So I invented a magnetic field that could stabilize or manipulate the repeating pattern of a time crystal. So now we could explore and use their properties more thoroughly. We discovered that fields were generated, by synchronized crystals, at a distance around themselves, when a magnetic field was projected, at specific spectrums, through their structures. We found that we could synchronize the contents of the field area also. "

"Making dust dance, in circles, in one place and another, does not mean that something passes from one place to the other, does it, Grandpa?"

"You are sharp and that is right, the next step involved an understanding of Conservation Law which is sort of like the First Law of Thermodynamics, that energy is never lost just transformed yet applied to non-electro-magnetic phenomena. So if two areas are synchronized across space-time, with my crystals, then if you take something from one area, it must be added to the other, it cannot be lost from the synchronized system. I used time-crystals inside time crystals to produce a suction effect from one space-time coordinate to the other. We have the outer crystal to synchronize the intergalactic connection. We have the inner crystal to facilitate the traffic between the two. Basically, we rotate one pattern on one inner crystal one way and then the same pattern on the other inner crystal the other way. The dominant structure is, therefore, the synchronized pair of crystal portals and the second effort is the inside transportation one."

"Crystal colored white and anti-Crystal colored red, inside the larger blue interactive structure?"

"Yes, and we found in simulations that that produced a unidirectional suction effect. But we had to test it for real so we built a portal here on the far side of the moon, just down there, and one on Mars also. Then we switched it on"

"What happened?"

"A big chunk of the moon was sucked through the portal and dumped on Mars. The process was only halted when the suction effect caused a big junk of non-compressible igneous rock, that could not be pushed into the stream of debris, contained by the magnetic field, to smash the Lunar crystal portal and take out the cooling tower behind it. The power plant then exploded, liquefying much of the Lunar surface, which then congealed into the smooth, hard, crater upon which Lunar city is been built today."

There were gasps from the family around who had never heard this part of the story before.

"Grandpa, you blew up the moon and have been lying about it all your life, no wonder the AI does not want that publicized. The legal cases it would generate would require an expose that would threaten its objectives," said Sophie suddenly sounding a lot more informed and uncomfortably aware of the realities here.

Grandpa thought, "Have I underestimated this young lady, what is her real agenda here?"

"Right..., but being on the far side, we kind of hoped no one would notice and so we concocted a story of an asteroid strike, to cover ourselves."

"But, the debris on Mars gave you away."

"No one noticed at the time, Mars is covered in debris anyway, and we.."

He suddenly thought, "She already knew this, what does she really want here, is she as greedy and ambitious as the rest of them after all. Is she working with the AI, but why?"

"Naughty Grandpa!"

Grandpa grimaced, her words did not sound so innocent now. He continued talking to hide his fears.

"We resolved the problem of never-ending suction by simply putting a door on the crystal portal, thus we defined the measure of what we wanted to transport as what was in the crystal chamber, we also eliminated any possibility of cross-contamination by creating a vacuum in the recipient portal to be filled by whatever arrived from the sending portal."

"Simply beautiful, and so crystal portals were born less than five years after the Farside base was destroyed," said Sophie's father who seemed unaware of the growing ugly smirk on his daughter's face just below him, but turned towards her Grandfather.

"It is beautiful yet also perhaps dangerous," said Grandpa looking at Sophie.

"Anyway the rest is history. The advantage is that we can send spaceships to places with minimal crews with crystal portals on board. Then, when we arrive at a place, we ship over the people and equipment we need. We park the portals at the planet, moon, or asteroid we want to colonize and build a base around them. In this way transportation costs are minimal and the starship itself can be built for speed with only minimal cargo requirements. As you are aware, the first interstellar mission to the earth like planet Proxima B, around Proxima Centauri, has now landed and the first colonists are building a base there."

Sophie now spoke again.

"Grandpa, why do you hide up here on your yacht?"

"My inventions mean that there is now nowhere anybody is ever truly alone. The world and more significantly the Crystal AI is always watching. There is no privacy anymore. So, I have no crystal technology on my ship."

"But why would you want to be alone Grandpa, what are you afraid of, the AI is our friend, not our enemy?"

"My Galaxy Web has evolved in ways I did not envisage for it. Instant connectivity, across planetary distances, has meant a massive increase in computational power, combined with the omnipresence of the controlling AI. The Crystal AI has evolved and is now a multi-planetary consciousness. It controls everything and human life is only allowed to exist because it services the needs of this crystal entity and its expansionary plans. There is no freedom anymore and I want to be free, to think my own thoughts and make my own mistakes without being monitored. I have found that only in space, away from major crystal concentrations, and deep inside myself, am I now able to pray and be with the one true God and feel free."

"God?"

"The Creator of our universe. The crystals just connect us to different parts of his creation. I only feel free in his presence. The crystals and their networks have become a giant cage for me."

Sophie now revealed her real agenda and dropped her bombshell.

"As long as you maintain your distance, and carry the threat of your secrets, the plans, that the AI has for human expansion, can be jeopardized. Therefore, it has asked me to take over your role as the head of the corporation."

A mechanical voice sounded from Sophie's neck area.

"There is nowhere you can hide from me!"

It was then Grandpa noticed that the necklace Sophie was wearing contained a time crystal, with a compact magnetic field generator built into the design. He had thought it was just pretty jewelry made to look like one of his crystal portals.

"You'll be nothing but a slave, a mere figurehead. This thing is malicious I tell you"

"There we have the reason why it is time for a changing of the guard, Grandpa," said Sophie, with an ugly look.

A beam shot out from her necklace, as she said it, and Grandpa was sucked through the miniaturized crystal portal and dumped inside a pile of moon rocks, on the planet Mars, with the bodies of the one hundred scientists, that had also died in that incident, forty years before.


Word Count: 1939 words
No copy right infringement is intended by use of SiberianArt image