Here’s an excerpt about faster-than-light travel from my current book in draft. I’d love to know what you think

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Kira joined Mother at the orbital facilities on Proxima Centauri. They were extracting materials at an ever-increasing rate. Three new ships orbited the planet and were similar to their original, maintaining the dodecahedron shape, with each of the twelve sides containing sensors, docking stations, and modular bays for future system upgrades.

They were smaller though, roughly half the size of the original as the organic computing and smaller microreactors reduced the need for the volume. The reduced volume also helped with maneuverability as they were dealing with significantly less mass. Less mass meant less inertial force and so the dampeners were more effective and allowed them much greater maneuverability.

They lacked engines as they waited for upgrades that were still being developed by Darian.

“These gravity wells are interesting,” Kira focused her attention back to the task at hand.

Mother was demonstrating her latest gravitational models. “I have a quantum radio at each of the gravity anomalies in this system and I have them at many of the anomalies in adjacent systems.”

“And that’s these measurements here?”

“Yes. The anomalies are somehow… connected.”

“Are we talking wormholes?” Kira looked closer.

“For lack of a better term. Gravity wells, wormholes, jump points.” Mother pulled in more data, “Whatever they are, they’re connected.”

“Would antigravity work there?”

“Likely not since we need to use the gravitational field. Antigravity might just dissolve the connection.”

“What about a rotational field?” Kira referred to the theoretical generation of dipole gravitational fields. The fields were generated by accelerating a superconducting dense fluid such as supercooled mercury. This created a gravitational field which reduced the mass of an object contained in the field to near zero. It might allow almost instantaneous acceleration and incredibly tight turning.

“That would help us regardless of these anomalies. I’m not sure if these need something else to unlock them. I’ve shot beams of ions into them and nothing seems to happen.”

Kira looked at the diagram and rotated the view to look from multiple perspectives. “Mom, what if you align your quantum radios in the three-dimensional space? Here to here?” she pointed. “Then focus the quantum connection between the two. You’ve got the quantum link but we don’t know if that’s aligned physically.”

“We know they’re entangled, we don’t know how,” Mother agreed.

“Can we do both? Entangle and align in space?”

“I think I can do that. Hold on.”

They sat in silence while Mother worked. It was nice to be present and working together. Kira never could manage the multiple instantiations the way Amit could handle them. She still liked being in one place at a time. Working side by side with her mother was nice. She only wished she could have done this when they were both alive… Well, human.

“All right, test number one…” Mother executed the command, “Nothing.”

“Well, we keep trying,” Kira responded.

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“Test 111.54.2.4B,” Mother executed the updated command.

“Wait, we are receiving something… but this is from test 111.01.1.21…” Kira held her breath. It had been three weeks of constant testing. They’d done two reset cycles and were approaching their third. The tests continued while they reset and nothing seemed to change.  But this time, something was different.

“We got an ion stream,” Mother watched the data as it fed in. “It’s the complete ion stream with the proper encoding.”

“How fast?”

Mother did the calculations, “Barnard’s Star is six light years away.” She checked her match, “The ion stream got here in six days.”

“That’s exactly three hundred and sixty-five times faster than the speed of light.”

“Yes.”

“What’d you change?”

“Test 111.01.1.21 coupled the physical alignment with an ion beam that we quantumly entangled with the receiving station,” Mother stated, referring to her notes.

“So it acted as a homing beacon?”

“Maybe, but it also shows that we’ve got to be careful of the timing of our tests. We’ve run one hundred and fifty thousand over the past six days.”

Kira hesitated, “So we should just wait a bit and see what happens with the rest?”

“That’d be smart.”

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Test 111.01.1.21 [attempt 2] status: [passed]

“Mom, it worked.”

“Perfect.”

The ion stream came through again with no issues. They’d done the test at five-minute intervals for one hour and each of the twelve ion packages came through in perfect sequence.

“Now we need to test a physical object. Do you think the entire system needs to be entangled or just part of it?”

“I’m thinking just part of it can be a homing beacon,” Kira reviewed the test results.

“I have another satellite there now. Should I send it?”

“Hold on Mom, I’ve got a thought. These ion streams entered at the speed of light and came out 6 days later. Should we test an ion stream at lesser speeds? I can’t imagine that this will just bring in and spit out material at the same speed each time.”

“Good point. Test 111.01.1.21b attempt 1 is ready. Let’s test it.  What do you think? Fifty percent the speed of light?”

“I mean, if the theory works why wait twelve days? We could do ninety percent and test it?”

“Let’s do eighty-six percent and see what happens.”

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Test 111.01.1.21b [attempt 1] status: [passed] – Duration [6.9767441860 days]

“Exactly eighty-six percent of 6,” Kira reviewed the results.

“So we need to boost the satellite to a much higher velocity. What speed can we get it to?”

“Normally I’d say ten percent is what the engines Darian designed could do but that’s with the larger ships and anticipating manuvering. We can probably push this one to twenty percent without issue.”

“That’s thirty days.”

“Are we in a rush?” Kira smirked.

“Fair enough.” Mother quickly queued the instructions, “Test 111.01.1.21c attempt 1… executed.”

The satellite’s ion thrusters engaged and the chunk of metal accelerated quickly toward the gravity well, its navigational system entangled with the receiving system.

It reached twenty percent of the speed of light, adjusted its vector as it approached the point in space, and…

Disappeared.

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Test 111.01.1.21c [attempt 1] status: [passed] – Duration [30 days]

“Well Mom, it works. Gravity wells plus quantum entanglement,” Kira hugged Mother.

Mother hugged back, “Yes, though we have a lot more tests on different distances to confirm.”

“Do you think it’s just one system to the next?”

“I’m not finding any other gravitational anomalies that would indicate other systems.”

“Where do you want to try next?”

Mother thought for a moment, “How about Earth? Do we have a satellite available?”

“There is one about two years away from our gravity well.”

“Let’s get it set up. Where else do we have assets?”

“Nothing faster. We can start deploying buoys at the wells to set up jump points.”

“Jump points or is there a better term?” Mother asked.

“Suction points?”

Mother made a face, “Blah.”

“Well, we have a few years to figure out a name, right?

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