Quantum Entanglement Communication

From FABT

"Zero latency and lag-free communication across hundreds of thousands of light years? That's why I signed up. To see miracles like that in action."
Samantha Traynor regarding the Normandy SR-2's QEC.
A holographic representation of Steven Hackett on a QEC.

Quantum Entanglement Communication (QEC) is an advanced method of telecommunication that facilitates instant, lag-free FTL communication across seemingly unlimited distances utilizing, as the name implies, quantum entanglement. When a pair of quantum-entangled particles is separated, a change to one particle will affect the other instantaneously, wherever it lies in the universe: QECs exploit this effect to transmit binary data over (theoretically) any distance, allowing instantaneous communication free of lag, ping and latency related issues that make interstellar communication a nightmare to manage logistically. Prior to the exploration of QECs, the galaxy operated entirely on subspace communications, utilizing an extremely intricate network of closely and carefully placed comm buoys across inhabited systems to create a string of communications from one end of the galaxy to another: whilst efficient, such communications were still limited to lag and latency issues, which only increased the further you got from the source of a transmission. QECs provided a very convenient alternative: it eliminated the need for a network of comm buoys altogether, only requiring two quantum entanglement communicators, one for the sender and one for the receiver, and both would achieve instantaneous connection with the other to allow real-time, lag-free communication.

In the asari cycle, the earliest evidence regarding quantum entanglement communication being explored was by the salarians in 1250 BCE, centuries before they achieved interstellar travel. Other races discovered the concept later, with the first humans to note the existence of quantum entanglement being Albert Einstein and his colleagues sometime in the 1930s CE. The first QEC prototypes were developed by the Salarian Union in 470 CE, but were quickly abandoned when the costs of such a project proved to be too insurmountable for commercial use, and after attempts to retrofit some QEC models for military use, this too was eventually abandoned due to skyrocketing costs. The Salarian Union, and later the Greater Quarian Republic, Turian Hierarchy, Asari Republics would all develop QECs, but they proved extremely expensive to produce, with a single quantum entanglement communicator costing about as much as fifteen heavy cruisers, or three dreadnoughts. Attempts to commercialize them also failed when it was quickly assessed that a QEC, as it existed, would not be applicable as a replacement for standard subspace communication due to two factors: firstly, each entangled particle could only carry a single quantum bit of data at once, and secondly, the system's exclusively point-to-point nature precludes peer-to-peer networking and data dissemination through the galactic extranet. For it to enter commercial use, these issues would have to be addressed, and while attempts were made, QECs remained largely a military piece of equipment where it saw the most usefulness. Another advantage of a QEC is its inability to be hacked, decoded or intercepted: this made it perfect for use in carrying out clandestine operations and performing high-level diplomatic and political communications. As such, most of the galaxy's militaries, or at least those who could afford to build QECs, used them solely for this purpose, either building them into important military fortifications, or outfitting them on space stations and flagships.

Upon humanity's introduction onto the galactic scene, numerous corporations, the Systems Alliance military and even paramilitary groups such as Cerberus immediately took an interest in QEC development. By 2183 CE, the Alliance's SPOOK project had led to the development and use of only a dozen QECs, all of which centered around a network based at the Alliance military headquarters on Arcturus Station, with each of the other eleven QECs placed at strategically vital military facilities. Through agents inserted into the SPOOK project, Cerberus was able to reverse engineer their own QEC technology under Project AURELIUS, even improving upon the Alliance's design to allow more cost-efficiency. Following the Eden Prime War and in response to the looming Reaper threat, Steven Hackett and David E. Anderson what pull they add in their respective military and political circles to acquire additional funding to produce more QECs, and by 2185 CE their efforts bore fruit, with the Alliance possessing a whopping 50, with that number boosted to 70 by the time the Reaper War finally began in 2186 CE. After the Post-Apocalyptic War, QECs had become cheaper and easier to build, largely due to outside-the-box thinking in using the telepathic communication of the rachni as a template, as they were discovered to use a natural form of quantum entanglement to communicate. This led to a massive breakthrough in QEC technology that the Galactic Dominion dominated, and by 2250 CE thousands of QECs were used across the massive empire, and finally entered commercial use by 2260 CE, and replaced subspace communications entirely by 2400 CE.


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