“That’s because we didn’t have the one thing that allowed the post-humans to make their breakthrough,” said Orphu of Io and paused. Everyone waited. Mahnmut knew that his friend was enjoying the moment.

“The million human bodies, minds, memories, and personalities that were stored as digital data in their orbital memory satellites,” said Orphu. His deep voice was triumphant, as if he’d solved some long-pondered mathematical conundrum.

“I don’t get it,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo.

Orphu’s radar flickered over all of them, a feathery touch on the electromagnetic spectrum. Mahnmut thought that his friend was waiting for their reactions, perhaps for their shouts of approval. No one moved or spoke.

“I don’t get it either,” said Mahnmut.

“What is the human brain?” Orphu asked rhetorically. “I mean, all of us moravecs have a piece of one. What is it like? How does it work? Like the binary or DNA computers we also carry around for thinking purposes?”

“No,” said Cho Li. “We know that the human brain is not like a computer, neither is it a chemical memory machine the way the Lost Era human scientists believed. The human brain… the mind… is a quantum-state holistic standing wavefront.”

“Exactly!” cried Orphu. “The post-humans used this intimate understanding of the human mind to perfect their Brane Holes, time travel, and quantum teleportation.”

“I still don’t see how,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“Think about how quantum teleportation works,” said Orphu. “Cho, you can explain that better than I can.”

The Callistan rumbled and then modulated the rumbles into words. “The early experiments in quantum teleportation—done by old-style humans in ancient times, as far back as the Twentieth Century A.D.—worked by producing entangled pairs of photons—and teleporting one of the pair—or actually by teleporting the complete quantum state of that proton—while transmitting the Bell-state analysis of the second photon through regular subliminal channels.”

“Doesn’t that violate Heisenberg’s principle and Einstein’s speed-of-light restrictions?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, who, like Mahnmut, had obviously not been briefed on the mechanisms by which the gods on Mars’ Olympus Mons QT’d to Ilium.

“No,” said Cho Li. “Teleported photons carried no information with them when they moved instantaneously from place to place in this uni-verse—not even information about their own quantum state.”

“So quantum teleported photons are useless,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “At least for communication purposes.”

“Not quite,” said Cho Li. “The recipient of a teleported photon had a one-in-four chance of guessing its quantum state—the quantum photon had only that many possibilities—and, by guessing, utilizing the quantum bits of data. These are called qubits and we’ve successfully used them for instantaneous comm purposes.”

Mahnmut shook his head. “How do we get from quantum-state photons carrying no information to the Greek gods quantum teleporting to Troy?”

“The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream,” intoned Orphu of Io. “He awoke and found it truth. John Keats.”

“Could you try to be more cryptic?” Suma IV asked caustically.

“I could try,” said Orphu.

“What does the poet John Keats have to do with quantum teleportation and the reason for the current quantum crisis?” asked Mahnmut.

“I suggest that the post-humans made their breakthrough in Brane Holes and quantum teleportation more than a millennium and a half ago precisely because of their intimate knowledge of the holistic quantum nature of human consciousness,” said the Ionian, his voice serious now.

“I’ve run some prelimary studies on the ship’s quantum computer,” Orphu continued, “and when you represent human consciousness as the standing wavefront phenomenon it really is, factor in terabytes of qubit quantum date on the wavefront basis for physical reality itself, apply the proper relativistic Coulomb field transforms to these mind-consciousness-reality wave functions, you quickly see how the post-humans opened Brane Holes to new universes and then teleported there themselves.”

“How?” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“They first opened Brane Holes to alternate universes in which there were points in space-time where entangled-pair wavefronts of human consciousness had already been,” said Orphu.

“Huh?” said Mahnmut.

“What is reality except a standing quantum wavefront collapsing through probability states?” asked Orphu. “How does the human mind work except as a sort of interferometer perceiving and collapsing those very wavefronts?”

Mahnmut still shook his head. He’d forgotten about the other moravecs standing on the bridge, forgotten that they might be taking his sub and the dropship down to Earth in less than three hours, forgotten the danger they were in… forgotten everything except the headache that his friend Orphu of Io was giving him.

“The post-humans were opening Brane Holes into alternate universes that had come into being through—or at least been perceived by—the focused lenses of pre-existing holographic wavefronts. Human imagination. Human genius.”

“Oh for the Christ’s sake,” said General Beh bin Adee.

“Possibly,” said Orphu. “If you assume an infinite or near-infinite set of alternate universes, then many of these have necessarily been imagined through the sheer force of human genius. Picture them as singularities of genius—Bell-state analyzers and editors of the pure quantum-foam of reality.”

“That’s metaphysics,” said Cho Li in a shocked voice.

“That’s bullshit,” said Suma IV.

“No, that’s what’s happened here,” said Orphu. “We have a terraformed Mars with altered gravity and are asked to believe that such terraforming could be achieved in a few years. That’s bullshit. We have statues of Prospero on a Mars where Greek gods live atop Mount Olympos and commute through time and space to an alternate Earth where Achilles and Hector are fighting over the future of Ilium. That’s bullshit. Unless…”

“Unless the post-humans opened portals to precisely those worlds and universes earlier imagined by the force of human genius,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “Which would explain the Prospero statues, the Calibanish creatures on Earth, and the existence of Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon and all the other humans on Ilium-Earth.”

“What about the Greek gods?” sneered Beh bin Adee. “Are we going to meet Jehovah and Buddha next?”

“We might,” said Orphu of Io. “But I would suggest that the Olympian gods we met are transformed post-humans. That’s where the post-humans disappeared to fourteen hundred years ago.”

“Why would they choose to change into gods?” asked Retrograde Sinopessen. “Especially gods whose powers come from nanotechnology and quantum tricks?”

“Why would they not?” asked Orphu. “Immortality, choice of gender, sex with each other and any mortal they choose to mate with, breeding many divine and mortal offspring—which is something the post-humans could not seem to do on their own—not to mention the decade-long chess game that is the siege of Troy.”

Mahnmut rubbed his head. “And the terraforming and gravity change on Mars…”

“Yes,” said Orphu. “It probably took the larger part of fourteen hundred years, not three years. And that was with the gods’ quantum technology at work.”

“So there’s a real Prospero down there or out there somewhere?” asked Mahnmut. “The Prospero from Shakespeare’s Tempest?”

“Or something or someone close to it,” said Orphu.

“What about the brain-monster that came through the Brane Hole on Earth just a few days ago?” asked Suma IV. The Ganymedan sounded angry. “Is it a hero in your precious human literature?”

“Possibly,” said Orphu. “Robert Browning once wrote a poem called ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ in which the monster Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest ponders his god, a creature called Setebos, which Browning had Caliban describe only as ‘the many-handed as a cuttlefish.’ It was a god of arbitrary power that fed on fear and violence.”