Dec 31, 2016

2016 in Review

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Edmund Emshwiller
and Edmond Swiatek.
My first blog post in 2016 was a recap of 2015. Here, I close out 2016 with a look back at the most popular wikifiction blog posts of 2016, reverse chronologically and month by month...

December
This month I was fairly busy working on A Search Beyond, what I now imagine as the first book in the Exode Saga. Of those blog posts created during December, the most popular one was Hierion Femtotubes (as of 2/18/2017 it is the most visited post from December with 583 page views). Since I'm running more than a month behind in posting links to my new blog posts on Twitter, I had to update this after about a month and a half into 2017.

Secret of popular tweets: #Asimov
Confessions. I used to tweet about new wikifiction blog posts very soon after they went live. During the days and weeks after I start a blog post, I often have follow-up thoughts about the topic, and I have no inhibitions about editing my old blog posts. During 2016 I began to allow my blog posts to age and cure before pointing to them from the twitterverse. I believe this is a healthy practice, even if I write an end of October ghost story and I don't share it on Twitter until the end of December!

November
source
Yes, I know! I really should learn to control myself. Every time I write a blog post about some element of pop culture it becomes one of the more popular posts at the wikifiction blog. In the month of November, it was Violent Delights, a short post about artificial life forms and how they are depicted in Hollywood.

Alternate Arkady
I can put the "Violent Delights" blog post in the same category as Slavery in Science Fiction, a post from 4 years ago that remains as the second most visited page on the wikifiction blog. I think of it as the Second Law of Blogging: your least favorite topics will always make for popular blog posts. Moving right along...

the tryp'At
2nd place. The second most visited blog post for November was Alternate Arkady. This was a fun post for me because it combined two of my Sci Fi hobbies: 1) discovering science fiction writers who I wish I had known earlier and 2) imagining how my favorite authors (such as Jack Vance) might have written alternate stories in an alternate Reality.  

2019 update: the tryp'At is now the #1 most visited page for November 2016, probably because I have made so many links to that page due to the importance of the tryp'At in the Exode Saga.

October
To Cool the Sun
Alternate Asimov was the most visited blog post of October. I adopted the fun hobby of creating "alternative Asimov" more than 8 years ago (see The Start of Eternity). For many years I thought that I would be satisfied to write my fan fiction sequel to Asimov's Foundation and Earth. Then a strange thing happened.

I slowly realized that when I set out to write The Start of Eternity I had opened a big can of worms. I discovered dozens of unanswered questions about the mysterious aliens who were the opponents of R. Gohrlay in the Time Travel War. In an effort to answer some of those questions, I decided to begin an investigative science fiction story called Exode. The chief investigator was to be an Earthling named Hana, but then Exode exploded in my hands.

Noÿs Lambent and Andrew Harlan
beside the time kettle.
The fundamental source of energy behind that explosion was Asimov's character, Noÿs Lambent. By creating a character (Noÿs) from a million years in our future, Asimov had created a devious trap for a nerdling such as I. Once I began trying to explore the mysterious origins of Noÿs, I discovered that I was wondering around inside a complex labyrinth. So far I have not found my way back out of this maze.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. However, Exode gradually grew from the planned novel about Hana to a trilogy and then, this year, to an even larger five part Exode Saga. There is no doubt: I'm addicted to the "alternative Asimov" sub-genre of investigative science fiction.

September
In the Ekcolir Reality. Original cover
art by Robert Fuqua and Arnold Kohn
Towards the end of 2016, I had my attention firmly focused on Isaac Asimov. The most popular blog post from September was The Law-Giver, an exploration of the origins of positronic robots, Asimov's Laws of Robotics and the telepathic powers of Asimov's positronic robots.

In the Exode Saga, I imagine that R. Gohrlay deployed robots like Daneel on Earth and throughout the galaxy as her secret agents who guided the course of human civilization in the Foundation Reality.

Asimov became aware of positronic robots when Grean made use of Asimov as her own time-traveling agent on Earth. Asimov helped Grean remove the last positronic robot from Earth, but he went on to help his analogue in the Asimov Reality write the first science fiction stories about positronic robots.

August
click image to enlarge (source)
The most visited wkifiction blog post for August 2016 was Land of the Setting Sun. I like to imagine that the site of Trysta's intervention into human history 10,000 years ago was the Center of the World. Located on the western shore of ancient the ancient Black Sea, Phasi was also known to the local residents as the land of the setting sun.

The Phasi Intervention
In the Ekcolir Reality, the course of European History was significantly different from what happened in the Final Reality. In the Ekcolir Reality, the Etruscan civilization expanded and dominated Europe. Trysta's Phasi Intervention had to shift the balance of power in the ancient world and assure that the Etruscan civilization crumbled away and tumbled into the dust bin of history.

The Trysta Extraction:
fiction from the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Edmond Swiatek.
Trysta lived at least two full lives in the Final Reality, one in the 20th century and one at the end of the last glaciation of Europe. According to Gohrlay, Trysta died near Blaubeuren, having traveled from the Land of the Setting Sun, near Phasi to the head waters of the Danube.

We must wonder if Trysta was allowed to die on Earth. Perhaps only her memories were saved and removed from Earth. If so, the remains of Trysta's biobody might be waiting to be discovered somewhere near Blaubeuren.

2019 update. An Asimov-related blog post, Year of Reason, is now the most visited blog post of August 2016.

July
The Trysta-Grean Pact
The most popular wikifiction blog post for July 2016 is Dimensional Transmutation. During July, I did more fiction writing than blogging, so there were only 4 posts to the blog during that month. One of my major writing efforts during July was crafting a beginning for Trysta and Ekcolir, what I now view as the middle book of the Exode Saga.

In his novel, The End of Eternity, Asimov played around with the question: what if you tried to make a Reality Change, but then you decided that you had made a mistake. Could you then go back through time and prevent yourself from making that Change? In Asimov's case, he imagined that the power to make Reality Changes was in the hands of a rather ponderous bureaucracy which carefully evaluated the implications of each proposed Change. Normally, nobody within Eternity even gave a thought to the possibility of "going back" and rescinding a Change.

click image to enlarge
In my case, the Exode Saga is built around the idea that the Final Reality Change was a compromise, what I call the Trysta-Grean Pact. Since the Huaoshy were going to alter the dimensional structure of the universe so as to make further time travel impossible, there was considerable interest in making sure that the Final Reality Change was correctly implemented.

Special thanks to Miranda Hedman (www.mirish.deviantart.com) for the DeviantArt stock photograph "Black Cat 9 - stock" that I used to create the blue "sedronite" who is in the image to the left.

Under the conditions of distrust that existed during the Time Travel War, and the issue of time paradoxes that can arise from people knowing their own future, it was inevitable that there should be a few tricks and surprises involved with the creation of the Final Reality.

June
Trysta Iwedon
One of my on-going projects is to write a blog post for each of the major characters, locations and imaginary science elements that are found in the Exode Saga. One such post is the one for Trysta Iwedon, which was the most popular wikifiction blog post for June 2016.

Realities
As an important secret agent working for R. Gohrlay, Trysta used many cover names. Her original name was Skaña. While growing up, Trysta became familiar with the idea that it was possible to observe the future. However, the Reality Viewing technology that was available to the positronic robots of Earth was quite limited. During the "Trysta Truce", Grean gave Trysta access to the more sophisticated Reality Viewing technology that had been developed by the Kac'hin.

That advanced Reality Viewing equipment allowed Trysta to view entire Reality Chains, not just a single possible future Reality. Trysta and Grean were able to look ahead through the Rkcolir Reality all the way to the Final Reality. They were able to find a Final Reality that was suitable to both the Huaoshy and R. Gohrlay and that is what allowed the Trysta-Grean Pact to go into effect, ending the Time Travel War.

May
source
During 2016 I created a series of blog posts celebrating the first 100 years of the Vance Era. One of these, about Lerand Wible, was the most popular blog post of May.

Other posts in my 2016 Jack Vance celebration series:
March 6 - Mirky Porod
April 9 - Vance +100
May 7 - Scutinary Vitalists
May 15 - Director of Forestlands
August 7 - Secrets of the IPX
August 13 - Pallis Atwrode
August 28 - Origins of Jack Vance
September 4 - Altramar
September 6 - The Junius Revolution
September17 - 100x
October 23 - Gharks and Hoos
November 20 - Alternate Arkady
________________________

at Wible's Resort
I like to imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality, the analogue of Jack Vance wrote additional stories that would be of great interest to fans of Jack Vance here in the Final Reality. For example, in one of the books in the Aquarius trilogy, The Clones of Sogdian, Kirth Gersen investigated an organization called Zodiac Control. His partner was "Drusilla I", also known as Karalin Umdys.

Working together, Kirth and Karalin learned about the strange genetic experiments performed on the planet Sogdian by Retz, a colleague of Demon Prince Viole Falushe.

In order to infiltrate the secret organization known as Zodiac Control, Karalin had to be in disguise, so as not to be recognized as one of the Drusilla clones.

April
The Femtobot Hack
"The Femtobot Hack" brings together two key ideas from the Exode Saga: 1) Interventionists were able to insert a femtobot endosymbiont into the human population of Earth after R. Gohrlay's positronic robots came into existence. 2) The efficiency with which that femtobot endosymbiont could subvert the function of our zeptite endosymbiont was highly dependent on a special population of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors inside the human brain.

The fact that human technological innovation could be boosted by exposure to nicotine was of central importance to the development of an industrial civilization on Earth right up until the Ekcolir Reality. That was the first Reality in which a new type of femtobot endosymbiont was deployed on Earth: what the Retrofuturians call the Phari endosymbiont. A Phari endosymbiont can allow human brains to control their zeptite endosymbiont without the need for nicotine.

Knitting humans: pek 2, Phari 1
The tryp'At are a new subtype of human that can function as a host for the Phari endosymbiont. However, in the Ekcolir Reality, deployment of the tryp'At on Earth led to a rapid pace of technological development, global warming and catastrophic sea level rise. Learning from this "side effect" of Phari endosymbionts, tryp'At interventionism was severely restricted on Earth during the Final Reality.

March
In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Arnold Kohn
and Frank Freas.
The blog post called "First Fiction" provided some backstory for the culture of Observer Base in the First Reality. I like to imagine that science fiction stories written in the Ekcolir Reality were heavily influenced by the replicoid of the analogue of Isaac Asimov from the Foundation Reality.

In the Foundation Reality, Asimov had contact with Grean and access to some stories that could be traced all the way back to the First Reality. That analogue of Asimov was provided with special nanites by Grean. Those nanites allowed Asimov to "take the place of" John W. Campbell after his death.

source
The Asimov from the Foundation Reality triggered a Reality Change and brought into existence the Asimov Reality. Within the Asimov Reality, that "older Asimov" mentored the "younger Asimov" (the analogue of Asimov who only had existed within the Asimov Reality), allowing the younger Asimov to become a successful science fiction author.

The replicoid of the analogue of Isaac Asimov from the Foundation Reality went on to staff and direct the Writers Block, which controlled the development of the science fiction genre in the Ekcolir Reality. The Atlantis Clones (including Ivory Fersoni) were able to read science fiction stories from the Ekcolir Reality and reconstruct certain aspects of life in the First Reality. Later, Alpha Gohrlay was able to confirm some of what Ivory had inferred about events in the First Reality.

2019 update. Another Asimov-related blog post, Prelude to Foundation is now the #1 most visited page for March 2016.

February
source
The most popular wikifiction blog post in February was called "Science Fiction in Deep Time". It was around the time that I wrote that blog post when I first realized that the Exode Saga should describe the science fiction story tellers who lived at Observer Base in the First Reality. Eventually, that impulse led to my discovery of the Escapist Clan and what I now imagine will be the fifth and final book in the Exode Saga.

The core concept behind 'science fiction in Deep Time' is that the science fiction genre was "invented" (re-invented) in the Ekcolir Reality as a way to prepare Earthlings for first contact with the alien Fru'wu.

The topic of teleportation was raised in that blog post, and I've become rather obsessed with teleportation during 2016. The poor suffering replicoid of Isaac Asimov must endure the disorientation caused by repeated teleportation events in A Search Beyond, but it sure saves wear and tear on the old space drive.

January
The Connatic's Library
At the start of 2016, I was writing a fan fiction story called The League of Yrinna. Chapter 2, 'The Katenary Islands' was the most visited wikifiction blog post for January. That story explores the idea that Glinnes and Duissane were at the culmination of a genetic engineering project that allowed creation of the tryp'At, a type of human that could use the Bimanoid Interface. I pretend that Glinnes and Duissane lived in the Space Age of the Asimov Reality.

source
To some extent, much of the rest of the year (2016) was devoted to figuring out how to fit the story of the far future of the Asimov Reality into the Exode Saga. Thus was born A Search Beyond.

A Search Beyond
I had fun creating several illustrations for The League of Yrinna. Maybe in 2017 I will include a few of them in A Search Beyond.

Related Reading: 2017 year in review - 2015 year in review

Next: historical research in 2017
visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Waiting for 2117

baby alien and Arthur C. Clarke
At the end of last year I made a humorous fake magazine cover that I could tweet out to the world on New Year's Day and now I'm turning that into a tradition. In the spirit of 2016 and our fake news epidemic: "Mesopotamia (Iraq) instituted the concept of celebrating the new year in 2000 BC." It was nice of them to select a nice round number (the year 2000 BC) in a calendar system that we would be using 4,000 years later.

1955
As shown in the above image (top right), baby alien and Arthur are going to flip the "year century glass" at midnight. Arthur C. Clarke was born in 1917. Rumor has it that he died in 2008, but I like to imagine that at the very least his replicoid is still active in the Hierion Domain.

Mamas, don't let your alien babies grow up to be cowboys... but do let them grow up to be science fiction writers.

Next: 2016 year in review.
Party like it is 2117...       Special thanks to Miranda Hedman (www.mirish.deviantart.com) for the DeviantArt stock photograph "Black Cat 9 - stock" that I used to create the "sedronite" who is in this image.

Hierion Femtotubes

Original cover art by Howard Brown;
Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1939
and Astounding Stories, September 1934.
I've been investigating the idea that Nivsaham is a nanoscopic artificial life form, well suited for tasks such as infiltrating Observer Base and spying on the tryp'At Council.

I've previously blogged about Hierion Tubes. If "Doc" Smith could play with hyper-spatial tubes then so can I. I originally imagined that a Hierion Tube allowed people to move between the Hadronic Domain (the world as we know it) and the Hierion Domain. Such Tubes are useful when characters in the Exode Saga need to go to and from "places" inside the Hierion Domain (such as Grean's workshop, Eternity, Observer Base and the Writers Block) and Earth.

For A Search Beyond, a lurking mystery concerns the connections between "places" such as Observer Base and the Writers Block.

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Howard Brown;
see Astounding Stories, March 1936
According to Zeta, it is possible to create Hierion Tubes that link "places" such as Grean's Workshop and Eternity, but it is also possible to create new "places" within the Hierion Domain and keep their "address" secret. For example, the tryp'At Overseers were able to use their "tracking nanites" to discover the "location" of the Writers Block. Ever since that discovery by the tryp'At, Irhit has been pestering the Dead Widowers while they try to work inside the Writers Block.

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Howard Brown;
see Thrilling Wonder Stories,
October 1940 and August 1940
The image to the left is a whimsical depiction of a single Hierion Tube. In some sense, things only really get interesting in the Hierion Domain when there is a network of Hierion Tubes. Before the Golden Age of science fiction, folks like Hafren Wells could content themselves to write stories about travel through a single Hierion Tube. Only later did the concept of a hierion tube network arise among select Earthlings.

Femtotubes
Previously, Zeta mentioned the idea of "picohieronics", and that is her preferred term for nanoscopic artificial life forms. Apparently tiny life forms such as Nivsaham are able to move freely from place to place in the Hierion Domain using 'femtotubes', a very narrow type of Hierion Tube. The poor tryp'At Overseers cannot detect femtotubes or Nivsaham.

The start of 2016.
Yōd believes that femtotubes were an invention of the Huaoshy. In fact, she suspects that it was only by using femtotubes that Grean was able to penetrate Eternity and "defeat" R. Gohrlay.

However, Zeta argues R. Gohrlay was the original inventor of femtotube technology and not only did she allow Eternity to be captured, but she made use of her own femtotubes to "disappear" and to personally escape capture by Grean. According to Zeta, only later did Grean even realize that femtotubes were a theoretical possibility. Zeta believes that femtotube technology is one of the technological advances that was made by positronic robots and never understood or replicated by the Kac'hin.

cover art by Edmund Emshwiller
Upon hearing Zeta's theory, Yōd simply shrugged and said, "There is a big difference between the Huaoshy and the Kac'hin. Under the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact, the Kac'hin were not permitted to have access to femtotubes." According to Yōd, that technology restriction was intended to keep Interventionist Kac'hin such as Lili from being able to penetrate the various sub-sections of Eternity. As told in A Search Beyond, Lili was able to find a way around that restriction.

Related Reading: 2019 update on Qaz

Next: special cover art for the New Year: 2017.

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Dec 30, 2016

Popp Science Fiction

Just before the Final Reality.
Original cover art by Walter Popp;
see Space Stories, April 1953
and Amazing Stories, October 1952.
At the ISFDB, Walter Popp has only a short list of attributed illustrations for science fiction magazines during the years 1952 - 1954. For information about Popp's wider career as an artist, see this.

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Walter Popp;
see Amazing Stories, August 1952
and June 1952.
Popp's name came up today during a discussion with Zeta and Yōd concerning the transition into the Final Reality.

According to Zeta, in the Ekcolir Reality, the analogue of Jack Vance wrote a story called 'Zonk's Tomb' about the adventures of two IPCC police officers. That story  has similarities to parts of what was published as Araminta Station in the Final Reality. Apparently the death of a young woman at Pogan's Point (where much of the action in 'Zonk's Tomb' takes place) caused such a reaction from fans in the Ekcolir Reality that Vance's "twin brother" Jack wrote a follow-up story called 'Return to Pogan's Point' in which the young woman (named Lilia) was rescued from Pogan's Point by a time-traveling IPCC agent.

In the Buld Reality.
Original cover art by Walter Popp;
see Startling Stories, May 1953
and August 1953.
In what Zeta calls the Buld Reality (just before the Final Reality), Shana Peterson published a story called 'Eat and Breath Nanites'. According to Zeta, 'Eat and Breath Nanites' is a sequel to Vance's 'Return to Pogan's Point' in which Lilia, having been taken into Eternity and provided with nanite tools, becomes an Interventionist agent working on Earth. Set in the 20th century before the end of the Time War, any time that  Lilia runs into trouble during a mission, she can travel back through time and change events to her own advantage.

Special thanks to Miranda Hedman (www.mirish.deviantart.com) for the DeviantArt stock photograph "Black Cat 9 - stock" that I used to create the  "sedronite" who is in the image shown to the right. 

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Howard Brown;
see Astounding Stories, September 1936
and December 1937.
According to Yōd, the main adversaries for Lilia were the tryp'At Overseers, although in 'Eat and Breath Nanites' the tryp'At agents were simply referred to as "the Q", named after a tyryp'At woman, Dr. Quinn.

Popp Quinn
femto-tubes
Dr. Quinn's team of secret agents were devoted to preventing the people of Earth from learning anything meaningful about hierions and sedrons. From the perspective of the Q, Lilia's use of hierion-based nanites on Earth was one of the greatest existing risks that might lead to information about hierions reaching the general population of Earth.

Next: nanoscale artificial life

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Dec 29, 2016

Eanru House

Fiction in the Final Reality.
Cover art by Brian Lewis.
The Reality Change that brought our world into existence was complex. Some of that complexity involved a group of Interventionists who operated out of Eanru House. Due to temporal momentum, there were attempts at the start of the Buld Reality to continue the Interventionist program of the Writers Block so as to make use of the science fiction genre as a way to provide Earthlings with information about alien visitors to Earth. Exactly how extensive those "efforts" were is not clear because they were all "edited out" of existence by the time Earth had reached the Final Reality.

Just before the Final Reality.
Cover art by José Lima de Freitas,
Jose Rubios and Henry Van Dongen.
Zeta's replicoid has been exploring the archives of the Writers Block, paying particular attention to the fuzzy boundary between the Ekcolir Reality and the Final Reality. According to Zeta, one of the writers in the Buld Reality who had his stories "edited out" of the Final Reality was J. G. Ballard.

The Mayness Reality
Cover art by Bradshaw.
Just before the Final Reality, Ballard published what was intended to be a "warning" to the people of the Final Reality. That warning was motivated by events in the Ekcolir Reality, a Reality in which the Antarctic ice cap melted, sea levels rose nearly 200 feet and Earth's oceans became an acidic wasteland.

source
According to Zeta, in the Buld Reality, Ballard published a long science fiction poem in Ambit magazine. The year was 1959 and Ballard explicitly described the role of fossil fuel exploitation and burning as a source of greenhouse gases and global warming. Apparently the poem was mostly about how Cecilie worked to convince Ballard to write the poem. According to Yōd, the poetry version of "Science Fiction From Nowhere" had structural similarities to 'Endymion' by Keats. As the poem unfolds, Ballard slowly comes to realize that Cecilie is not from Earth, but rather, she is a constructed human who naturally resides in the Hierion Domain.

Just before the Final Reality.
Original cover art by Bob Adragna
and Gino D'Achille.
As one of the named character in "Science Fiction From Nowhere", Grean was depicted as trying to make sure that a team of Interventionists on Earth do not violate the Rules of Intervention. That was a difficult task because there was a well-coordinate team of Retrofuturians who were intent on sharing information about hierions and sedrons with the people of Earth. Finally, Cecilie and Grean reached an agreement by which the poem "Science Fiction From Nowhere" was "retracted" from Ambit, but in the Final Reality Cecilie and Thomas were later be able to pass on some limited knowledge of hierions to the Editor.

Just how many such "retractions" and "cleanup jobs" were needed right before the Final Reality is not clear, but Shana Peterson (operating out of Eanru House) was apparently involved in publishing several of the "retracted" works. Zeta has identified James Schmitz as another author who had to be "edited" by Grean. Apparently Schmitz wrote a story called Exoplanet Legality that described in some detail how hierions were manufactured in the Triskelion star system during the Asimov Reality.

Next: more forbidden fiction
visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Bimanoid Interface

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original art by Luis Royo.
When I received collections of infites from Thomas and Izhiun, I was able to deduce the fundamental operating modes of the Bimanoid Interface. In the case of Parthney (who is a clone of Thomas and whose mind was shaped by developmental control nanites while growing up on Hemmal), the Bimanoid Interface can be used in two ways:
1) so as to allow "conversations" with his own replicoid (residing within the Hierion Domain)
2) so as to allow unconscious "downloads" of information from the Sedronic Domain into his brain.

Bimanoid Symbiont
source
Technically, it is not wise to say "into his brain". Back in 2013 I was using the term "bimanoid symbiont" to refer to the zeptite endosymbiont that resides inside of each person. When information is pushed from the Sedronic Domain to Parthney, is first goes directly to his zeptite endosymbiont. That information can then be integrated into Parthney's neural network, becoming a functioning part of his mind.

I am deeply troubled by the idea that humans can be subjected to this sort of "programming" by our zeptite endosymbionts. To some extent, R. Gohrlay won for we Earthlings a chance to at least partially escape from the influence of our zeptite endosymbionts, but I suspect we are still heavily under the influence of behavioral control signals generated by our zeptite endosymbionts.

source
Yōd thinks I'm silly to make a distinction between "my mind" as I conceive it and my mind as a product of a triumvirate: my neurons, my femtobot endosymbiont and my zeptite endosymbiont.

Bimanoid Interface
The technical term "bimanoid interface" has slowly crept into use on Earth by people who do not really understand the meaning of the term. I've been told that "bimanoid interface" is actually a physical connection between human brain cells and a person's zeptite endosymbiont; a kind of hack by Interventionists who were trying to give humans a communications channel to the Hierion Domain.

source
That connection or "interface" is composed of femtobots. The story of how a femtobot adapter was designed for human brains is told in A Search Beyond, the first book of the Exode Saga.

Tryp'At
My working hypothesis is that the Trysta Truce in the Asimov Reality was an effort to provide Earthlings with a Bimanoid Interface. It maybe that only a select subset of humans have a functioning Bimanoid Interface. It might be that having a functioning Bimanoid Interface is the defining characteristic of the tryp'At.

In the Ekcolir Reality. Original
cover art by Edmund Emshwiller.
It remains to be determined if using the Bimanoid Interface is intended to be the means by which tryp'At Overseers guide Earthlings into a safe future. Alternatively, it might be imperative that most Earthlings come to share the special gene combinations that were provided to the tryp'At. Zeta favors this hypothesis and she suggests that the Bimanoid Interface is actually a way to "re-calibrate" the effectiveness of our zeptite endosymbionts, making them a better fit to the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact.

According to Yōd, the original zeptite endosymbionts for humans functioned to prevent humans from ever having a technologically advanced civilization.

Bimanoid Interface 2.0
The Bimanoid Interface is designed to allow humans to explore new technologies, develop an advanced space travel capability and spread ourselves among the stars while also giving us a chance to avoid destroying ourselves.

Related ReadingBimanoid Interface 2.0

Next: retracted science fiction
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