"You know," Jem said, halfway through the interview, making sure that the camera got his good side, "many Elyrans are quite impressed with Earth technology." He showed them his wrist. "Look at this! I picked this up at the emporium just the other day. It's a genuine Earth timepiece called a Timex. Imagine - a clock on your wrist! And don't ask me how many crowns I had to pay for it."

Mia and Sahsha tried to stop themselves from smiling.

"But what most would like to hear about, I am sure, are those wonderful, umm, cellphones I think they're called. Too bad they aren't available for sale?" Jem's question was obvious.

"Umm, I'm sorry about that," Sahsha said through her translator. "But Earth Government has prohibited the distribution of devices with certain technologies. One of these proscribed technologies is called Phase-Wave. It's a bit like radio except it has unlimited range."

"Unlimited, my lady?"

Well, I can place a call to Earth if I wanted."

"Goodness!"

"Well," Mia said, "Humans didn’t used to have Phase-wave. It's a fairly new discovery."

"What did you use before?"

"Something called a Seren station."

"Tell me about these Seren stations."

"Well, just before Phase-Wave, there were five Seren stations in the Solar system at the time, whereas now there are none - Phase-Wave had made Seren transmitters obsolete, so they were retired. There was a sixth one being constructed near Saturn, but with the discovery of Phase-Wave, they abandoned the project. The Seren stations were on Venus, Phobos station on Mars, Neptune, Jupiter, and near Earth, of course.

"A Seren transmitter is really a kind of wormhole generator, but of a kind that allows matter to pass through. Normally, wormholes don't allow matter to pass through without collapsing, but this kind allows light and electromagnetic waves to go through. Even so, it gets... pinched off in a matter of nanoseconds. At least the collapse is predictable, and with no... unusual effects when it does. So Seren transmitters come in pairs - one on each end of the tunnel. Since the wormhole doesn't last long, the pair of transmitters need to be synchronized to a ridiculously precise level so the extraction of light pulses or electromagnetic waves can be coordinated properly, extracting the bits that get through and then properly reassembling them, sort of, as well as re-opening the hole to transmit the next bit.

"These transmitters allow near-instantaneous communication between the major planets - Earth, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Neptune. Saturn had no station then, so they had to limp along with delayed communications.

"However, the stations were hellishly expensive to run, but commerce knows no boundaries: even if each used about five hundred exajoules of energy per Earth year to run, each colony was able to keep theirs running, even if they used eighty percent of their total planetary energy output. In the case of Earth, though, this was only twenty percent. And with Mars and its energy-poor ecosystem, they had to resort to extremely large and expensive solar farms, built specifically for that purpose; they didn't want to be left out in the cold like Saturn."

"Exajoule?" Jem asked.

"It's a scientific Earth unit of measure, for measuring large masses or amounts of energy."

"All right. I'll look it up later. Please continue. This is interesting stuff!"

"For the humans," Mia continued, "the good thing about the retirement of the Seren transmitters was that, after their retirement, Humans suddenly found themselves with a mind-boggling surplus energy capacity of about three thousand exajoules. Imagine an energy surplus of more than six times the total yearly energy output of old twenty-first century Earth. And with a present human population just fifteen percent the size of old Earth, I dare say, at the time of the Seeker Mission, we were probably the richest single race in the galaxy. This practically-unlimited energy surplus was how EarthForce (the current slang for the United Earth Defense Force) was able to construct a big, new fleet in less than a year.

"Anyway, even though Seren-based communications wasn't really instantaneous, it was almost instantaneous, and it improved our communications by a matter of more than a thousand-fold. Let me illustrate - the distance between Earth and Neptune is between 4.3 and 4.7 billion kilometers, right?"

Jem giggled. "I'll take your word for it."

Mia smiled at that. "That means a radio signal would take more than four and a half hours to travel from Triton to Earth, and for a Seren signal, it would take about twelve seconds. A vast improvement over conventional communications, but still not as good as Phase-Wave, which was really instantaneous."

"Those are human units of measure again. But don't let that stop you - we'll catch everyone up in post-production. Continue, please."

Mia nodded. "The powers that be on Earth have decided not to share Phase-Wave with our neighbors, but at least Earth did provide the Federation with detailed plans on how to build Seren transceivers... Although I hear no one wants to actually construct one because of the enormous power it would take to run it..."