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title: The Origins of FTL

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# The Origins of FTL

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It was to be a bright light for all mankind, built in the breadbasket of the reaches of the solar system. Decades of shuttling materials, soil, seeds, and specialists to Ganymede had turned the barren rock into a network of thriving farms and food processing facilities, turning the black between Jupiter and Saturn a little less deadly. Starvation was now no longer among the leading causes of death, and some foodstuffs had even begun to trickle back to Earth, the excess of fully industrialized farming becoming realized far outside the biosphere of Earth.

Scarcity returned in an expected form: the growing network of ag-domes and habitats had turned the power grid on Ganymede into a patchwork of power distribution hubs, generators, portable reactors, and solar panels. There was a need for a proper power plant to run Ganymede. The Pan Arctic Engineering Cooperative stepped up to the plate, seizing the opportunity to return to the large scale project planning that had founded their organization. There were protests from other polities invested in the Ganymede project, Chinese and Cantonese engineering firms began planning their own reactors. The discoveries in Reactor 1 would preclude all such projects, however, and pave the way for humanity's expansion across the stars.

To shield the delicate crops from the threat of thermal or electromagnetic radiation from the reactor, the large scale reactor was to be built deep underground, a sphere half a kilometer in diameter with supporting areas for fuel tanks, operations centers, and maintenance tunnels. The project was massive in scope. Dense shielding and staggeringly powerful magnets would be created, shipped and installed at a blistering speed by any other organization's measure. The project planners had learned from their predecessors during the war, and mastered the ballet of multi-disciplinary development and logistics. In only two years, the cavity for Reactor 1 would be excavated, lined, wired, and prepared for the proving tests leading up to a full reactor ignition. An ignition that, by some accounts, would have forever trapped humanity in the bottle of the Sol system.

Construction on the reactor was completed on January 3rd, 2100, in the turn of the century. The final weeks of engineering had been plagued with problems that remained, up until this point, unexplained. Strange readings from electromagnetic sensors, distortions on cameras, and reports of mild hallucinations from crew operating inside the reactor cavity. These problems would grind the project to a halt, with physicists, engineers, and mathematicians called in from around the PAC nations to study and surmise the underlying cause of these strange phenomena. 

Much like the triad that created the Compact, a Russian, American, and Japanese trio of scientists would be the first to discover the source of their problems. By creating a crude interferometer experiment and collating data over months, they came to an unexpected conclusion: because the abnormally low radiation and a strong magnetic field both from the planet and the reactor cavity, the room had become a well of what the team was convinced were in fact Tachyons. Experiments with these showed that not only could these Tachyons be funneled away from sensitive equipment, but that the reactor cavity was akin to a river meeting a dam, collecting huge amounts and then releasing in a predictable ebb and flow.

Much like CERN and the Large Hadron Collider of the last century, Reactor 1 became one of the largest hotbeds of scientific experimentation on the cutting edge of particle physics. While the PAC formally had the rights to the location, they allowed hundreds of scientists from other polities and corporations to join in on the research, hoping to glean a breakthrough similar to the development of the LIF reactor in 2044. Hundreds of theories are proposed, from power generation, time travel, computing and, quietly, weaponry. It would take more than 25 years for progress to net serious results. The funding, interest, and attention paid to the Tachyon Collector would eventually wane, eventually to the point where the PAC was tasked with finding a practical application or shutting down the project. Barring success, the leadership decided it would be prudent to return the project to the original purpose of powering the now dangerously under-powered colony on the planetoid.

A breakthrough was had in the early months of 2137. A red letter year in Humanity's history, the PAC team were experimenting with high energy lasers from the original LIF components of the reactor inside the chamber, when the test bench spontaneously, and in correlation with the ebb of a wave of tachyons, disappeared. Fearing the bench had been sublimated by the high power lasers, the researchers began pouring over the logs looking for any explanation as to what might have caused the laser controllers to malfunction. The truth would come from a very unscientific source, however, as when one of the interns began checking mail from the outside world, a bill for damages from one of the domes contained video footage of the very same test bench falling from a significant height and penetrating one of the ag-domes. The fluke experiment had teleported the entire bench miles away, and had left the setup completely intact. The rest of the year would be spent furiously attempting to reproduce the conditions, and even understand how this could have happened. The working theory was, that for a brief instant, the cavity had transposed the matter in the chamber with tachyons, and riding the tachyon wave, had deposited it a significant distance away. The energy that had created this effect was incredibly low, measured in kilo-electron-volts, and the physicists theorized that maybe they had stumbled upon a way to transport matter vast distances almost instantaneously.

The subsequent experiments would prove their theory correct. Before the year was out, the PAC team would teleport a probe over 10 AU using only a small amount of energy, depositing it well into the Oort Cloud of the solar system. The breakthrough represented the opening of the galaxy to the human race, as not only was the process understood, it had taken no great leap of technology to create this transportation method, rather the proper physical conditions allowing for the phenomena to manifest. Scientists and engineers met with logisticians and businessmen to figure out exactly how to standardize this technology to fit the needs of the future travelers, and suddenly the whole solar system was preparing to explode out of their confines into this new frontier.

The only question now was how to share the bottleneck of humanity. As the PAC showed hesitation and reticence to hand over access for fear of being locked out or sabotaged, it became clear that the discoverers of this technology could not be its stewards. Only one polity, the Deseret Pact, had managed to perform the delicate diplomatic balance needed to administer a gateway for humanity before. It was no surprise to anyone when, upon their offer to take up the mantle once more, that the sum of Earth and her nations would agree. Under the Deseret's watchful eye, Humanity would spill out into the cosmos, seeking untold fortunes and opportunity, freedoms and homesteads, and the promise of a better life, if they could keep it.