ONI Report: Chaos Emeralds

ONI Secure Transmission
Encryption Key: Blue
Timestamp: 05.16.36.1414
From: Dr. Lieutenant Commander Joss Durden (SECTION I, R&D)
To: Codename HORSEMAN
Subject: Chaos Emeralds

/Begin Message/

Performance Report as you requested sir.

I've been to multiple worlds. I've seen alien civilizations that don't resemble anything that we would recognize as life, but the recent assignment at Mobius has me thinking just what the hell I am holding in my hand right now.

The Mobians have had legends dating back to their creation of mysterious jewels that have incredible power. They called them the Chaos Emeralds. They were named so because the earliest Mobian Religion (Not the Church of the Ancients), The Followers of Aurora, believed that all evil was trapped inside the jewels. Looking at the jewel myself, I wasn't sure what to think. I certainly didn't think that it was a weapon of mass destruction.

The jewels themselves are notable in their physical appearance. The large majority of jewels that we have found seem to have a brilliant cut design. The point is sharp, but blunt enough not to cause extensive physical harm to whoever is holding it. A total of fourteen edges are cut into these jewels and the size is roughly the size of both of your fists put together. The weight of the jewels themselves actually seems to vary depending on which one you are holding, but the average weight of the Emeralds hovers somewhere just under a kilogram. I mean, they're light. Very light. Actually, when I was handed the jewel, I was wondering if I was holding anything at all. Following that revelation, I decided to perform a density analysis of the jewel. Unbelievably, the density itself of the jewels are consistent. These things are spitting in the face of science.

The jewels defy the laws of physics several times actually. The most apparent of these scenarios are when they are placed precisely on their point. The jewels will not tip over. Unless forcefully moved and placed on its side, the Emeralds remain on the point with no noticeable wobble.

The jewels cover multiple colors of the spectrum. Every Emerald corresponds to a color of visible light, the colors that you would see in your run of the mill rainbow. That isn't very surprising.

This is the surprising part: The emeralds themselves actually radiate a wide form of radiation that's gauged as slightly stronger than Alpha Wave radiation, but weaker than Beta Waves. Until we can properly quantify the level of radiation we're seeing, we will settle on Chaos Radiation. Not directly harmful to Humans, or any other sentient race as we have seen in the testing area. The Emeralds radiate this energy that our machines can pick up, and as we figured out a while ago, they can power our instruments and then some.

The energy given off by them is astronomical, yet we are detecting no exothermic reaction. The Emeralds don't heat up or melt anything around them, but they do glow. The glow can be as powerful as roughly half the light of the sun under serious circumstances. Standard Radiation absorption pads can suck the energy out of it and convert it to electricity, but we've made sure to have multiple breakers in place to cut the flow, as there have been accounts of overcharging equipment. The incident in blowing out that substation is still pretty fresh in everyone's mind. About thirty thousand Mobians were without power for three days.

We've made a neat discovery regarding placing two or more Emeralds together. The result is rather interesting actually. When an Emerald detects its sibling is in close proximity, they start to encircle one another like binary stars do. When more Emeralds are added into the mix, the encircling accommodates the third Emerald and so on. We were able to get up to four Emeralds in one of these dances. The Emeralds then proceed to give off electromagnetic radiation in pulses. In other words, the emeralds flash in a periodic fashion in intervals of a second of a pulse and four seconds of a dormant period. Outside of a lab, we would assume that these pulses would be visible for quite a few miles to any observer.

In terms of spaceflight, they do little alone, but I don't think I need to remind anybody about the usefulness they have in interstellar and interuniversal travel. We know that the jewels can distort space and time, and they can connect universes through means that we don't truly understand yet. Slipspace seems to interact with the jewel's natural power. It seems that the power of the Chaos Emeralds are so great that they create a singularity so powerful that it can link to another universe through massive tidal forces that balance out when two universes join together through sizable wormholes. Jumpgates like the one in orbit at the L1 point at Mobius' moon and the other which is in stable orbit around ours can stabilize these reactions and keep rifts open. We were working off ancient designs that Matthew Mobius drafted in the late 23nd Century. The gates were already intended to communicate with one another, but we had no idea that they could communicate between universes. A single Chaos Emerald must be kept at the jumpgate's power center to keep the gate open, but the more Emeralds are fed into the machine, the more stable the transition may be, and crossing will be quicker subjectively and objectively. Without a gate, the jump will only take place if the jewel is in close proximity to a Slipspace rupture. Slipspace already rips a hole in spacetime. A Chaos Emerald supercharges it. We are indeed working on a portable version, and tests are going well. If the funding comes down the right way, we could be looking at a series of trans-universal jumpgates, but we're looking at years of political ping-pong and funding issues. But I digress.  

In terms of durability, the emeralds are nearly indestructible to conventional means. We first figured this out when Doctor Kildare accidentally knocked one off a lab table. The Emerald did not break or shatter. Quite the contrary, it stuck on its point and remained there until someone picked it up. Right on there, I ordered a lattice structure analysis. The results were unexpected. I assumed that we would be looking at your emerald composition of Beryl with touches of Vanadium, like you would expect an Emerald to have. Instead, we got something more akin to a diamond structure of interlocking carbon molecules infused with a touch of beryl here and there. This leads me to the question of why we call them Emeralds at all when they more resemble diamonds in appearance, durability, and lattice structure? That's a question for another time perhaps.

Things like hammers and power drivers do absolutely no damage to the jewels. Not even a scratch. We hypothesize that a bullet might scratch it at least, but not destroy it. We haven't tried this test since we don't want the Emeralds damaged, lest we catch flak from the Royals for it. Hard Light projectiles might yield more favorable results, but we're not sure.

Which leads me to my next point of other Emeralds in the Universe. We know that Emeralds exist in more than one place since we have seen evidence of Chaos Emeralds or their equivalents in our universe. The Emeralds we have found so far are more rectangular in their cuts (sometimes known as a Princess Cut). We have found four [4] in our home universe contrasting the seven [7] in the Mobius universe. This has the speculation among the other scientists that many many more exist out there in the unknown, we just haven't found them yet. Hell, we may have even found them but had no idea what they were in the past.

Which is... what I wanted to talk about next. Off the record.

A long time ago, we found evidence of Forerunner crystals being used to distort space and time. They also functioned as computers that allowed something called 'Reconciliation', which accounted for time dilation. I think there might be a connection between the two.

Now, I'm not saying that the Forerunners created the Chaos Emeralds, but the function of these jewels is too precise. Too powerful. We may be looking at Clarke's Third Law, namely that any any technology that advances to a sufficient level will appear to be magic to us. And I think that many would say that the Chaos Emeralds work like magic. It's possible we're looking at hypercomputers that can hold an entire planet's worth of data on it. And there may be more.

Can you imagine if we could tap into it? What sort of information we could get? What sort of advances? We could possibly advance our civilization multiple millenia overnight! The problem is that this is pure speculation. If this is indeed a computer, it doesn't resemble anything we would think of as a computer. It's possible that the 'wires' may be sub-molecular, probably Strings themselves if we theorize this correctly, but we don't have the technology to just access it. A computer needs an interface, and well, we don't have a clue what that is.

So, until then, we're stuck with a marvel still. We're still analyzing this, but have we considered using shards for power? We can't harm the emeralds themselves, but if we could actually figure out the composition of the Emeralds themselves... could we grow our own? Use them as power sources? This may all be a pipe dream, but it might still be something to consider.

I'll keep on working on studying the Emeralds. If anything comes up, you'll be the first to know.

Actually, there's one more thing I'd like to add... there's stories that have circulated around the Mobians here about a sort of being that actually lives inside of the jewels. I know this is just cultural superstition, but I thought it would be worth noting for anthropological studies. Some people, most notably the Echidnia peoples who come from the continent of Albion in the North across the sea think that there's a creature that lays dormant in the Emeralds. Specifically the Master Emerald, the big one that serves as an anchor or mediator for the other smaller ones. Think of the Master Emerald as the brain and the Lesser Emeralds as the limbs. As of now, we have moved the Master Emerald to an undisclosed location given that the original location of Monte Alban wasn't the best location in hindsight given multiple attempts to get the Emerald away from the site. No less than a platoon of Marines guards the Emerald day and night, but the Mobians had one condition that a Guardian must be appointed to specifically watch the jewel. The identity of the new guardian has been kept under wraps in order to avoid a security breach. Only the Marines on duty as well as other essential personnel are to know the Guardian's identity.

The Guardian's role is to protect the Emeralds, but keep the creature known as Chaos inside the realm of the Master Emerald. Chaos has roots in Ancient Echnidnan culture, at least seven hundred years ago, three hundred years after the first colonials appeared on Mobius. Objectively speaking, the story doesn't hold water. Scientifically speaking, we have not located anything resembling an organic creature residing in the Emerald. We would certainly know if there was. As a scientist, I can say that there is nothing to worry about.

But the Echidna are still adamant in their beliefs. I just can't shake the feeling.

I'll keep running tests. If we can locate another Emerald, preferably an extraterrestrial one, we can begin breaking tests to see just what can kill a Chaos Emerald. I'll keep you posted!

Signing off.

/End Message/