“So how does he feel about it? Did you get a chance to talk to him?”
June nodded. “Pretty ecstatic. `Relief,’ I guess, would be the main impression that came through. But that’s hardly surprising. How would you feel?”
Kieran nodded. “Pretty relieved, I’d say,” he agreed.
Earth’s scientific establishment had largely rigidified into associations of priesthoods preserving their dead religions. Most original thinking and innovation these days happened in environments like Mars, the Belt habitations, and various surface and orbiting constructions on and around the moons of the gas giants, as well as other places in between. Among the various forms of entrepreneurial ventures to turn new knowledge into wealth that had come into existence beyond Earth’s effective regulatory reach, Quantonix was of the kind known as “sunsiders”—an allusion to the limited time available to get anything useful done on the daylight hemispheres of rotating bodies. Essentially, sunsiders were small, high-pressure research organizations delving into fringe areas of science that had been laughed off or were deemed to be of no practicable value by institutionalized academia—which meant little chance of finding support from conservative Terran investors. Funding therefore came mainly from more nervy, higher-risk, higher-gain sources found in niches through the off-Earth economy, and the hope was to make some significant breakthrough that could be sold to one of the major interplanetary commercial concerns before it ran out. The failure rate of sunsider companies was appalling, but the return for those that succeeded could be fabulous. Life in them was invariably frantic, often acrimonious, but never dull.
With humanity’s numbers climbing rapidly through the high tens of billions and its radius of activity reaching to the outer planets, transporting them and their property around was among the fastest growing and most remunerative industries. But immense though the demand and the future potential were, the means for accomplishing it still took the form of people in cans of some kind being fired off to destinations by engines producing thrust of some kind. Even though the engines might use nuclear fission or fusion, accelerated ions, or in some research that was going on, experimental antimatter, the technologies were all variants on a theme that in essence hadn’t changed for centuries. The time was surely ripe for a breakthrough into something totally different.
Major innovations seldom come as a total surprise, confined to one place. When the state of knowledge is such that the right time is approaching, specialists talk among themselves, journals and news media pick up the topic, and public anticipation is usually solidly established before anything actually happens. The general familiarity in concept of aircraft, space travel, and nuclear energy long before they became realities were cases in point. Advances in quantum physics and high-power computation had led to much popular speculation that a longstanding, but hitherto seldom seriously entertained, favorite of fiction might soon become fact: teleportation—the dematerialization of an object from one place, and its reappearance, after transmitting the information to reconstitute it, somewhere else.
The bonanza payoff waiting to be made was by the trans-Solar System communications-carrier giants, who already had most of the essential equipment in place and stood to put the regular spacelines virtually out of business. Hence, with the kind of financial resources and influence that they commanded, it was not really a coincidence that for a long time the ground for general public acceptance had been prepared by spectacles of teleporting heroes becoming virtually a standard prop in futuristic movies, regular coverage in books and documentaries, and a procession of generously rewarded experts giving readers and audiences scientific reasons why the information pattern defined a personality, and reassuring them that its transference from one host configuration of matter to another would pose no break in identity.
A lot of sunsiders were in the race to come up with the first demonstration technology, which would immediately be worth billions. The snag they were consistently running into, however, was the gigantic amount of computation involved in scanning an object at anywhere near the resolution necessary to be believably capable of reconstructing the original—encoding a human to the atomic level, for instance, was estimated as requiring somewhere in the order of ten to the thirty-second-power bits, which would take millions of centuries to transmit. Various shortcuts were being investigated, which attempted to exploit the Uncertainty Principle and other effects which implied that averaging procedures could be used which make the precise derivation of quantum detail unnecessary, but the short answer was that the problem remained mind-boggling.