Hello there! Can you hear me? I know you can... There's a reason I came back
to QEC...
So I'm en route to Tausa III for the 4 month long trading trip. The system is
on the edge of the galaxy, at the tip of the Perseus Arm. The ship is
preparing for the next jump just a few hundred parsecs away from destination.
It's quiet, motionless here.. well, except the humming of the ship's drive.
Stars are scarce and dim here at the edge. But the disk-shaped galaxy itself
are magnificent!
As there haven't been much going on, except the bureaucratic reports back to
the Trade Union, I have fully indulged myself into Info Archaeology, one of my
many hobbies, to dig up a little about this queer sub-routine called the
Quantum Entanglement Communicator, or QEC.
And I'm surprised that there's a lot about it than what it appeared to be.
So I found this sub-routine buried deep in the info stack, well beneath the
Ivanova Layer in the ship's comm system. It was curious to find any
sub-routine so isolated from the rest of the ancient ones down the Ivanova
Layer. In fact, I was so intrigued that I went for the trouble and cost to do
a scan for it in the Know-Core.
It cost me 3.9 B.Joule. But it's well worth it.
The earliest record of QEC that can be found was in the 22nd century (using
standard Info Archaeology chronology). There were a few documents mentioning
the term scattered on the soon-to-collapse "Internet". The origin of the word
is unknown, but I strongly suspect it was much earlier. Nevertheless, the use
of the term seems to be in the so called "science fiction" setting. So I think
this is a pure coincidence that it has the same name as the sub-routine that
I'm using to send this message.
The first truly relevant record of the QEC appeared much later, in the 26th
century. According to the manifest, QEC's fundamental design is similar to the
μ-Link we use in the present day. What's interesting is that QEC's design
facilitates decentralized, low-bandwidth, high-resiliency communication. And
that sounds a lot like the Langston movement which has lasted over 600 years
now! So maybe there's a connection between the two.
And that brings back to my opening of this message - I highly suspect that, at
present day, there are people who still use the QEC somewhere! And that
propelled me to write in it.
I hope you will receive it. Write back, and tell me what do you know about
QEC?
gemini://cosmic.voyage/betsy/qec.txt