Ansible

An ansible is the simplest form of faster-than-light communication between worlds.

Although the actual method of operation is a closely guarded secret of the Theocratic Science Service, the 'popular science' approach taught in schools bears quite a close resemblance to the ansible of pre-6000 science fiction. Two sub-atomic particles are made to form a quantum state pair, and are then separated. The coupling effect ensures that these particles are kept in opposite spin states at all times. Therefore changing the spin of one particle immediately makes a change in the other, and this can be used to transmit a signal.

In the early days of colonisation, this was a simple and cheap (although slow) method of allowing a settlement ship to communicate immediately with its parent planet. In the millennia since, many scientists have refined the techniques both to control and to monitor the spin state of the coupled particles, resulting in a thousandfold increase in the speed at which data can be transmitted. However, as the TSS will not release the details of the coupling process to non-members, the creation of ansibles has become an arcane ritual which is still a complete mystery to most researchers.

In the last thousand years, it has also been discovered that a pair of ansibles can switch partners, allowing different worlds to talk without the need for every world to have a particle associated with every other. Small worlds often only have a single coupled particle (and a tech level 0 world may not have any), while even the most populous worlds are unlikely to have more than a hundred.

However, the classic ansible has a number of difficulties, the most well known being that it can take several seconds, or even minutes, for a new connection to be established. Scientists wishing to improve this are mostly impeded by the fact that the Theocratic Science Service keeps the recoupling process as a black box, although it is widely believed that it depends upon a secondary coupling to particles which are injected into the jump engines of temple ships.

In modern times, most 'ansibles' are in fact interspace relays, a more efficient method of communication. However, ansible theory is still taught in schools, leaving the general public mostly unaware that when they make an ansible call, they aren't actually using an ansible.