Chapter 102

Dear Sister-in-law,

I seem to still get letters that Will sends to you. I guess that somewhere deep inside every AI is a bureaucratic ganglia that insists that the world has not changed. I wonder if they, like some companies and more government agencies I worked with, would not still be using couriers who ran on foot if possible because horses are a newfangled idea?

Okay, that is a bit paranoid even for your brother who seems to be positively paranoid. Yet here I sit with my spouses lost, at least two of them. One I've heard from, I suspect almost accidentally and one I haven't the foggiest clue of what might have happened to her. The only thing that is good is that once I was unable to understand the lessons in maths that Lily is taking I looked at the schedule and picked out the highest level I understood, then I took that course. I think I understand mathematics better now than I did when I graduated college. I know I certainly needed the review.

Now I'm taking time every day to take at least one hour of what the AI insists is remedial math. Vectors and acceleration were certainly not remedial math when I went to school. Indeed even most engineers don't have more than a passing knowledge of such things. Still since one of the goals my research group has is producing a human built Artificial Intelligence to replace the ones that the Confederacy is lending to us for many reasons, a better understanding of physics is a must.

There are so many areas of what we call science that require more math than I had when I graduated school that I'm sure I can't go wrong when pursuing more knowledge of mathematics. From what Will has sent me and what I've learned I think that the Confederacy AI's are what we might think of broadly as quantum entangled machines. That means that if they have a decision tree it contains every possible answer. At least I think that is what it means.

Supposedly a quantum machine exists in all possible universes. Yet even the AI's that we're borrowing from the Confederacy aren't willing to admit more than hyperspace. That they tell us is something that we can't understand. Well now that I'm slowly digging through the highest theoretical mathematics that humans had imagined and learning where the Confederacy says we were off track, I suppose that without the knowledge base that I'm beginning to learn it might well be impossible to understand hyperspace. And without understanding hyperspace then space travel becomes nearly impossible except in generation ships.

Once I saw a chart like one of the cut down trigonometry tables that showed how long you would have to accelerate at one G to reach a speed of .9 C but it has been so long that I'd have to use the math that I'm just beginning to understand how to figure the problem again. Suffice it to say that even at accelerations of that magnitude travel, even to close stellar neighbors was the work of decades at best. Certainly the traveler would experience less time than the culture she left, but in the end could journeys that spanned more than a few light-years be made? After all without understanding the concept of hyperspace and using that particular area of physics space is essentially inaccessible to humans.

So for the time being we must borrow technology from the Confederacy. And though I hate to say it, for now we have to borrow their technology. The tough thing that you may or may not notice is how much they actually don't tell us. Things like how to make an in system drive, or how to build a better nuclear reactor. Things that to them are probably not even considered, we have to search for. Or maybe it is just that the AIs can't imagine that we would want our own tools that we build that we can hope will be and stay loyal to us...