The Sailfish Conjecture 

by Andrew R. Cole

 “In vino veritas.”

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

“Yes, sir. We believe the sotabit transmission contains a human voice yelling the words ‘in vino veritas.’”

Liam, the haggard quem analyst, scrunches his brow at the end of the phrase, being nearly as shocked to say the words as the Mission Director was to hear them.

Ignoring the more concerning portion of Liam’s response — the part that mentions that a freaking human voice had been transmitted across the Solar System within what should have been part of a quem control signal for the MarLIn submersible — Danielle Lusci, Chief Mission Director, asks almost rhetorically, “Is that Latin?”

“Yes, sir. It means in wine there is truth. We think it might be a form of Truth or Dare as a drinking game.”

“You got all of that from three words?” Director Lusci inquires, more flummoxed than irritated.

“No, sir. After accelerating the initial transmission by 17x to sync the carrier signal to its proper period, we discovered another phrase: ‘Aut veritas at aude.’ Either the truth, or dare. We’ll need to wait four hours and 48 minutes while the service module goes dark for the next batch of data.”

Now Dani was irritated. “How are we going to tell the media that we have someone at a frat party in the middle of my mission?” The remainder of the room sits silently and returns her sharp stare with blank faces; the enormity of the impossibilities that might be involved to cause this anomaly wipe away any semblance of reason or duty from their jumbled minds.

“Gin is not going to like this,” Dani mumbles to herself.

                                                                                  

“As you know, the XASA Mare Landing and Investigation mission spacecraft launched in 2037 for its seven-year journey to Enceladus. After a planned gravity assist from Jupiter in 2040, the module continued on its way to Saturn. Just last year, the MarLIn Q-bot — tucked away safely inside the service module — successfully completed a shallow aerobraking maneuver through the upper atmosphere of Saturn. The subsequent Titan aerogravity assist maneuver then safely delivered the package into orbit around Enceladus.”

XASA Communications Director Virginia Barnes takes a short pause during her update to the media to assess the room and ensure that she hasn’t lost anyone with the same details she has been communicating for her entire five-year career at XASA. So far, so good.

“After completing nine successful reconnaissance orbits over the south pole of Enceladus, tiger stripe Alexandria was identified as the best candidate for the next stage of this mission. The landing eclipse should place the MarLIn Q-bot near a location that has three important features: a thinner section of ice shell at just 2.3 kilometers thick; a shallower area of the moon’s southern interior ocean at 23 kilometers deep; and the widest tiger stripe during the current seismic cycle amongst candidates Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Alexandria, and Camphor. The width should present easier access to the ocean for MarLIn and reduce the pressure and frequency of hydrothermal water jets that might buffet the delivery drone during the descent operation.

“Thankfully, 63 years after Voyager II and 27 years after Cassini had both presented Enceladus as a desirable scientific target, this portion of the mission was a success. MarLIn is now submerged in the waters of Enceladus. We are delighted that we can now share some videos with you.”

The lights dim slightly as Director Barnes pivots to view the video screen positioned adjacent to her podium. The XASA logo first appears in the center of the screen: the large, gaudy, intrusive letter X dominating the area that the letter N had previously occupied — remnants of a corporate coup, a new mission statement, and an infusion of Q-coin.

An accelerated video clip from the delivery drone then proceeds to play: the large, shielded hatch of the service module opens to release its payload into orbit; thrusters fire; cables deployed; water jets spray. Eventually — and without incident — MarLIn lands on the surface of Enceladus within 3.7 meters of a seemingly open through-fissure. Not a bad shot! 

The video then switches over to MarLIn’s dorsal-fin camera, presenting a fish-eye perspective. MarLIn ambulates by flopping back and forth like the fish-inspired robot it is, shifting its internal mass to one side or the other to control the direction of the flop across the last few meters and down into the Alexandria fissure.

Clunk.

Ice. Of course it’s frozen solid here. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s not like XASA didn’t just spend four days capturing data and images from nine orbits over this darn crevice to make an informed decision about where the most direct access to water might be. Perhaps there was a seismic shift in the icy shell that closed the fissure after the last passes? Perhaps. Thankfully, with additional scanning data from the drone, the ice is just 27 meters thick in the fissure where MarLIn rests. 

Plan B is fire!

Well, not really. Not fire exactly, but resistive heating in MarLIn’s spear-shaped accessory. Yes, MarLIn resembles the real fish in more ways than just its ability to flop around on the dock! Its large dorsal fin (which is sized more proportionally like a sailfish than a marlin — but the acronym options for SAILFISH are overly convoluted) is the thermal radiator for the quem computer. However, this heat can be rerouted to the spear out front to create a quite-literal steerable hot-knife-through-butter scenario. Plus, it looks totally awesome in videos to see the spear glowing bright red and slicing through ice, frost, and snow. 

The heat from the small nuclear reactor inside the service module doesn’t hurt either! Oh, was that not mentioned? How could MarLIn possibly melt through upwards of five kilometers of ice if the target was missed or the fissures were frozen solid down their entire depth? Swappable sulfur-selenium batteries charged by the service module’s nuke and a graphene umbilical connected between the delivery drone and MarLIn allow for quick work of ice.

And what of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963? Yes, it is still enforced internationally in 2044 — if by enforced you mean peering over your neighbor’s fence, slowly squinting at them and watching their every move while they do some shady stuff. Regardless of the level of enforcement, the treaty only covers nuclear explosions and non-contained reactions in space, so no nuclear engines. But a fully contained (and small, so tiny!) fusion reactor is perfectly fine and safe in space, right? Right.

Back to the video.

A glowing red spear appears in front of MarLIn’s dorsal camera and proceeds to slice and dice its way through the remaining 27 meters of ice. The drone makes a few dozen trips back and forth to the service module for recharged batteries to power the MarLIn via umbilical cable. The 26 days it takes for the glowing red spear to cut to water is reduced to a mere 26 seconds in the presented video — and just like that, MarLIn enters the interior ocean of Enceladus and slowly swims around in the mysteries of the deep on another planet, err — moon! (Hold for applause).

The video ends with a sequence of MarLIn slowly descending to the bottom of the ocean, finding an attractive little geothermal vent to snuggle up against — and then the deployment of chem-synth sensors and other science apparatus begin. The hunt for life. The hunt for the same kinds of life that certainly began on Earth around similar hydrothermal vents, in the presence of similar nutrients and energy. Does life find a way, even this far away from a system’s star?

Ginny repositions herself in front of the podium after the video ends and begins addressing the media again.

“Folks, unfortunately, this is where the video ends. MarLIn experienced an anomaly, and we have since lost live control and instantaneous data transmission from the submersible. We are currently communicating via back-up radio transmitters, which give us approximately a three-hour round-trip signal to Enceladus, with an almost five-hour blackout period during every 12-hour orbit waiting for the relay to the service module.

“XASA will continue to collect and analyze data and share findings or videos when possible. However, please be aware that the radio signal is heavily attenuated under multiple kilometers of ice and needs considerable correction.”

Time to bail.

“That is all for now. There will be no questions. Thank you.”

                                                                                       

After dodging the inquiries shouted by the media after leaving the briefing room, Ginny rushes into Mission Director Lusci’s conference room and closes the door behind her.

“Dani, you’re going to have to bring me up to speed on the quem system. I know it’s proprietary, but with 7.3 trillion Q-coin invested into this mission, the media is demanding answers. They are asking about how we have… err, had… live control of MarLIn.”

Dani chuckles. She knew these questions would start trickling in throughout the mission, but she never expected that the dam would break this way, with the flood of inquiries hitting like a tidal wave all at once due to this critical anomaly.

“OK, Ginny. However, after I’m done telling you what I think you should know, we can go back through your notes and highlight what the media needs to know. Some of this stuff is XASA IP — and if you recall, as a privately-funded agency, the amount of QC XASA spent on this mission should really be of no concern to the media or the public”.

“Fair enough, Dani. How much time do you have?”

“All of it,” Dani admits, “and that’s where the lesson starts.” Noticing that Ginny is confused by her blunt statement, Dani begins the primer.

“The discovery that memories are particle-based changed everything. The isolation of quantum memory particles by an AI lab bot in China during a neural-link experiment in 2028 was obviously announced in the world news.”

“Of course, I wasn’t working at XASA yet, but I remember that day like it was yesterday,” Ginny says, smiling at the thought of the almost Zen-like realization that occurred around the world when the news broke.

“There’s a reason it feels like it was just yesterday, Gin.” Dani pauses and contemplates the profoundness of the words that will follow.

“What if I told you that rather than filing away memories in your brain, these memory particles actually store nothing more than an exact coordinate in space-time to when and where this quem was created? When synapses fire, they actually create entangled pairs of quantum memory particles: one quem is deposited within the neuron, while the other, the anti-quem, is left behind in space-time, just waiting to be pinged.”

“What do you mean pinged?” Ginny asks.

“Exactly that. When you go to access a memory, the quem inside the neuron is activated again by a firing synapse, causing it to instantaneously receive information about its entangled anti-quem. Your brain is not replaying memories of sights, sounds, or smells. A portion of it is quite literally traveling through time and space to the exact coordinate at which the quem was created to experience that event again.”

“Whoa. Wow. Wow…” Jaw, meet floor. Ginny is speechless.

“Yeah, wow is right! And obviously it’s not just a single quem, but a stream of them to record the memory coordinates over time at that point in space — and each of the six senses are entangled at variable quembit rates depending on sense priorities. A few researchers think that there might be some kind of quantum wormhole created when the synapse fires, but that is purely speculative since it’s not detectable — and honestly, it’s not necessary for entangled pairs as we understand them.”

“However, this hypothesis is how we here at XASA were able to create the Instantaneous Control Over Distance system, or ICOD. It’s more than just bot control at this point, since we have expanded it into general bi-directional data transfer, but that was where it started. Why wait for the delay of data signals traveling at the speed of light across the solar system when you can transfer them instantaneously?”

“Wow, of course, yeah. Why not?” Ginny says, understandably still puzzled. “But how?”

“This is where I will not get into too many of the technical details, but I can give you some bullet points. I know you communications folks love sound bytes, but none of these are sound bytes, mind you, since they will not leave this room.”

“Understood,” Ginny agrees with slight resignation.

“We built two hexagonal-shaped quem computers: one is here in the quem lab, and the other is inside the MarLIn. Each of the six senses that we utilize to encode quem data is represented within one slice of the hexagonal prism, each used to encode different quem types: sotabits encode phonons for sound, ghanabits encode olfactons for smells, jivhabits encode gustatons for taste, kayabits encode tactons for touch, cakkhubits actually encode photons for sight, and lastly manabits encode kardiatons for love.”

“Love?” Ginny asks, almost shocked to hear the word in an institute of science.

Dani smiles. “Yes, love. It was the missing piece of the puzzle. It seems that the brain will not successfully link to a quem computer without all six of these basal senses being active at the same level — and the cognizant recognition of matters of the heart apparently impact the operation of the rest of the mind during a neural-link.”

Dani pauses to take a quick sip of water. There was one last technical marvel to reveal, and she needs to reflect on how much she wants to share.

“Those quantum wormholes I mentioned before? Yeah, we made those. They get created inside nested quantum toroids — what we call bosonoids — so that the throat of the wormhole is tangent to the circumference of each toroid, and then the wormholes propagate at near the speed of light around inside the toroids in opposite directions. Each bosonoid is basically a nested pair of superconducting Casimir plates in the shape of a toroid, which helps to keep the wormholes open as they propagate — and any change in the coupling force of the nested toroids by quantum gravity waves from the entangled quems can be detected as vacuum fluctuations within the bosonoid.

“Unlike how quems operate within the human brain, we are not actually accessing the memory information directly from a distance. We are detecting and decoding information about the quem information — or meta-data about the quems. Quemeta-data, if you will, but you shouldn’t. I told Vijay that I hated that word.”

“Vijay?” Ginny asks, as she had never heard this name before.

“Yeah, he’s in the quem chamber in the lab. Vijay’s our pilot. He’s our secret weapon, which is why you’ve never heard his name — and now he’s in trouble,” Dani says nervously.

“What kind of trouble?”

“The kind that you won’t tell anyone about. Just like the rest of what I’ve explained to you. Tell the media that it’s confidential and proprietary and that’s it! Now if you will excuse me, I need to go salvage my mission and save my friend.”

                                                                        

Dani enters the quem chamber and sees that Vijay is still unconscious. His neural-link to the quem computer is currently operating in only one direction, as it is out of space-time sync with the quem computer in the MarLIn, so his brain is essentially stuck in neutral.

“Liam, any data updates?” Dani asks.

“Yes, sir. The most recent batch of data just finished transmitting about 20 minutes ago and we’ve just finished with error correction. The data’s a bit of a mess, but I think I just saw something that stands out that should help us.”

The Mission Director is eager. “Which is what?”

“First, a few details in the data that we haven’t talked about yet, no matter how trivial,” Liam starts. “The ocean temperature was 23 degrees C when we first entered, which is darn near the perfect room temperature. Crazy, right? And the hydroxides and ammonia are both much lower than expected, along with the pH. It’s actually only 8.3 rather than 11-12 pH like we initially thought.

“Anyway, here’s the real kicker. When Vijay had MarLIn settle on the floor of the ocean near the hydro vent, the temperature was 37 degrees C. Sure, it was a little high, but we were able to adjust the qwermhole speeds and dilation amounts to keep in sync with just a few seconds of lag. Then the anomaly happened, and our latest data show exactly what caused it.”

Dani raises her eyebrows, waiting.

“We fell. Seismic and pressure data shows that MarLIn was knocked down into another fissure in the core before Vijay could react, and it got slightly wedged another 22 meters below the surface. Due to seismic friction, it’s 87 degrees C there. The cooling fin couldn’t keep up, so our time dilation went way out of whack.

“Which leads me to the next set of voice recordings.” Liam pressed play.

“Bona, Saturnalia!”

...

“Non semper Saturnalia erunt!”

...

“Io, Saturnalia! Io, io, io!”

   Dani is stunned. “What is today’s date? Crap, it’s December 17th! Freaking Saturnalia! Holy crap, this shouldn’t be possible!”

While everyone else was still in shock over the recordings, Liam spools the quembit rates down and got the cooling under control. Time dilation corrected itself in turn, and eventually Vijay was awake and in control of the MarLIn again.

The MarLIn flops itself free from the fissure and ascends to the ocean floor, ready to find a new vent to cuddle and explore. The video feed is a slide show at these quembit rates, but it’s manageable. At one point, a blurry image hints at something like a school of small fish-like objects, or bubbles. Probably just bubbles…

A final image is the last chunk of data ever received from MarLIn: a giant jaw with teeth, chomping down on the bot.

Enceladon. Life had found a way.

Pisces minutos magni comedunt.