The Colonial Orthodox Church (COC)
The congregation hummed in a low drone, the whole cathedral reverberating, resonating with the pitch of the sound and above this background chant, Stieff’s voice rang out loud. “We are the brain of God. The universe is the mind of God. We rebuild the consciousness of God through the colonisation of the universe. This is our one destiny. This is our one purpose, the true purpose.” The congregation murmured the supplication, following Stieff’s lead. When he’d finished, he stared skyward in silence, the congregation joining him and an amazing and utterly complete silence descended for, what seemed to Zohra to be, an exceptionally long time. Finally Stieff rose silently to his feet. The congregation rose too, agitated and eager to get out on to the streets. They bustled and hustled out of the cathedral into the violence on the streets of the city under the cold, dual moonlit night.
Z'Shoka
Z’Shoka was different though, it had been spawned from the scientific community, the fabled and, many would say, eccentric scientist Zenshi Shokasovic had become convinced, obsessed even, that the answers to managing the universal laws of quantum time lay not in a complex scientific implementation of artificial intelligence but through the simple power of thought. That thought was itself a form of energy, a force not yet understood that operated outside the bounds of normal time. Through the power of thought, one could not only control one’s own body, a skill which was practiced by many pseudo-religions, but you could outwardly affect and even control the surrounding space-time constructs.
It had been the discovery of the principles of quantum time that directly led to the development of the dilation A.I. and this discovery was one of the classic triplet of scientific breakthroughs on the home world that augured the new era. The new era that bought about the establishment of the Colonisation Programme and the commencement of the migration of civilisation away from the home world. However, the discovery of the mass-determinant boson by Yakuro Kaoshi some years earlier had been the breakthrough which would allow the light speed barrier to be understood and finally breached (a subject which had become almost mythical, a taboo topic to investigate) but until this was coupled with the quantum time principle, there would be no way that anyone could survive superluminal travel. Even so, there would have been no need for this ability had the third key discovery that of controlled harmonic energy release come early enough. But it didn’t.
...
She’d often wondered at the stupidity of trying to match the energy of the quantum loop in order to reveal it. If they had the energy to reveal it then why would they need to reveal it and if they did smash it did they really think they could contain the unleashed spatial dimensions? Science battered away in the vain hope of ‘seeing’ the loop and then formulating how to control it. Anke Bohm’s masterful insight was to link Huth’s equations and Kaoshi’s boson and to realise that one had to understand what would happen when the quantum loop was broken and how to contain it, in order to break it in the first place. From her background in astrophysics she’d realised that the equations she knew well for describing the behaviour of the gargantuan black holes scattered throughout the known universe, were in fact one solution of Huth’s harmonic formulae. There was some intrinsic link between these vast gravitational beasts of the universe and the tiny quantum loops within every single nuclei of every single particle of matter.
Kamatz
Connor held his gaze for only the briefest moment and then quickly dropped the smile and returned to the tiered Kamatz board. It was a complex, tactical game. The board itself consisted of sets of concentric circles on different tiered levels. Each concentric circle segmented into a series of colours with each segment freely rotating allowing the players to align or misalign colours from neighbouring segments which in turn created paths to advance certain shapes inwards and upwards to victory in the centre but at the same time enabling paths through which opponents shapes could be dropped to lower levels.
