The Weapon - Lex - part 34
By Diana the Valkyrie
A star is born
Update: 18/11/2003 to valkyrie05


I thought about quantum entanglement the way a young Hopami thinks about her
first fertilisation. You know it will happen to you one day, but you're not
sure exactly what it will feel like. Oh, I knew all the theory, but that's not
the same as actually experiencing it for yourself. I even had some inkling of
what it would feel like, via the entanglement that any of the People has with
her Momma. But the Momma-Daughter relationship isn't the same as the
relationship between the Two, and I was eager to experience it for myself. One
day, I promised myself, one day. But until then, I could experience it
second-hand at times like these, at a birthing.

Their entanglement increased, to the point where there was a distinct danger
that the Two would become One and not Three. I've never seen that happen, but
I've heard about the possibility. It's not clear to me that such a thing is
entirely a cause for sadness. Is it a loss, or a unity? No-one wants to lose
their identity, but if such loss happens, surely the One has all the
characteristics of the Two? No point in me thinking about this, though. This
isn't my specialty, and it was up to the Two to maintain their twoness even as
they engaged in the act of union.

Now we Four cranked up the volume, sending surge after surge of energy to the
Two, so that they could maintain the standing wave of energy that bound them
together. As they increased their amplitude, they also decreased their
wavelength, until only the de Broglie waves were powerful enough to express
their passion. This was something that the Four could not, would not intervene
in, the necessary separation that prevents total quantum entanglement is
maintained by the trust between the Two.

And then not even a joint Schroedinger function would suffice as the infusion
of power beamed by the Four, the energy that we'd stored over the years of
orbiting and waiting, became too great to be expressible in anything other
than gravity waves. The Two became a gravaser, bouncing the gravitons back and
forth in femtoseconds, so closely were they linked. And still we pumped up
their energy, as their excitation communicated itself back to us, and we were
stimulated to release all the energy that we'd collected, into the entangled
Two.

Not even the People can keep control in this situation; it was inevitable that
one of the Two would fail to reflect the standing wave, and a torrent of
gravitational energy poured out along a single axis, the axis that linked the
Two.

We Four held our breath as we watched the uncontrolled release of the most
powerful force that is ever seen in the universe, the expression of love and
trust of two of the People for each other, the tightly focussed beam of
gravitational energy that lances from one to the other, from the First to the
Second, or from the Second to the First. We held our breath and prayed that
the beam would travel towards the fireball, not out into cold empty space; if
it went the wrong way, the Two would not become Three, the potential Person
would not become actualised.

Prayed? Yes, prayed. Some of us believe that the fireballs, collectively, are
the generators of the universe; without them, there would be nothing. No
fireballs - no species to Guard, no People. Others pray to one of the gods of
their Guardianship species. Others believe that the collective will of the
People is what shapes reality. Me? Living with the Hopami for a couple of
hundred million years had left me with some beliefs, the sheer collective
majesty of the fireballs pulled me in another, different, direction.

Either our prayers worked, or the quantum probability was on our side. The
blast of gravitons curved down, down, and penetrated the fireball. We watched
the fireball shiver, shake and distort as all that energy disrupted its
internal processes. Regions were compressed, other regions were rarefied. In
the compressed regions, fusion processes that should have taken millenia were
completed in microseconds, and the resulting explosions induced more
instabilities in the heart of the fireball.

The First followed the beam of energy deep inside the fireball; the Second
hovered inside our tetrahedron, exhausted from the birthing and the vast
expenditure of energy in such a short period of time. But the First vanished
from our view, it's hard enough to look inside a fireball at the best of
times; when one has just been disrupted by a birthing, it's just not possible.
Usually, the fireball doesn't even survive after the process is complete; the
gravitational perturbations end up with it shaking itself to pieces. That's
why we always use planetless fireballs. But the trade seems fair; lose a
fireball, gain a Person. I wonder if the fireballs see it as fair.

But I knew what was happening inside there. The First was guiding the vortices
of energy into ever tighter knots, ensuring that four black holes with
suitable mass, charge and spin would be available, and that they would come
together into the physical part of one of the People. And then, with the
physical body in place, she would bootstrap the basic mind, use that to bring
up the under-mind, and then that would load the baby mind.

A little later she returned out into orbit. "Congratulations, everyone," she
said, "a star is born."