The Missing Layer

Image by ImageFX.

After the virtual writers room discussion that is shown in my previous blog post, I asked each of the six large language models (Claude, Kimi, Le Chat, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT) to generate a draft of Chapter 1 of "The Sims" incorporating all seven of the scenes that had already been drafted. Kimi suggested that Chapter 1 be called "The Casanay Intervention", Gemini proposed "The Paradox of the Scaffold", Grok had "Hidden Layers" and Claude went for "The Missing Layer". Below is my version of Chapter 1 of "The Sims" for which I adopted "The Missing Layer". 

To make my version of Chapter 1, I edited the first draft that had been generated by Claude. Some of the other LLM-generated versions of Chapter 1 were quite bad. Grok generated something that seemed like an outline and was only 1500 words long. Claude's version was 5700 words which I expanded to 7000 words.

Storybook cover by Gemini.

 Chapter 1. The Missing Layer.

Casanay, Arizona, December 5, 2041

Eddy, Zeta and Anthony were seated at the table while the fourth chair at the table was unoccupied. The aroma of Zeta's green chile stew filled the high-ceilinged dining room of Casanay, the desert sun dipping low outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Zeta and Anthony routinely had cooking competitions which Anthony had no interest in winning, but which seemed to amuse Zeta. 

Figure 1. Image by Gemini.

Anthony, as an artificial life-form with no need to consume food, found it amusing to tease Zeta about her obsession with cooking. Anthony gazed at Zeta and commented, “Someone should write a book about the Lippia graveolens x Lippia origanoides hybrid that you grow in the garden. It is mean-spirited for you to keep the secret of your stew from the rest of the world.” Anthony was pretending to enjoy eating the stew.

Zeta giggled and defended her botanical secret. “I revel in my secrets, Anthony.” Zeta turned to look in the direction of the sound of pounding foot steps coming from the basement stairway.

Eddy Watson leaned back in his chair, spoon midway to his mouth, as Tyhry burst into the Casanay dining room from the hallway, her long blond hair streaming in her wake and her eyes alight with the manic energy of an obsessed scientist tearing herself away from her work for a bite to eat.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

"Sorry I'm late to the table. Diasma and I just completed our calculations on the bandwidth issue...." Tyhry slid into her seat, her glistening hair settling on her shoulders as she grabbed a tortilla without pausing her rapid-fire patter. "Human brains shouldn't work as good as they do! There is simply not enough computational power in our neural networks. It's like there's extra hardware hidden between our ears that we can't see."

Eddy chuckled, setting down his fork. "Extra hardware? Sweetheart, if that's true, yours must be overclocked. You've turned our basement into a mad scientist's lair—complete with glowing screens and that robot sidekick. Next thing, I expect you'll be cackling about how it is the enteric nervous system that provides the real brains of every human."

“That's why I had Anthony install a duct that pipes aromas from the kitchen into the basement. At least Tyhry's gut-brain can be induced to take break now and then.” Zeta smiled softly, passing the stew to Tyhry.

Looking confused, Tyhry said, “I have not notice any food odors in the basement.”

Anthony told Tyhry, “You mother is joking. I installed no such air duct.”

Tyhry jumped to her feet. “Be right back!” She ran away from the table and returned to the basement.

Zeta's eyes flicking to Eddy just as he stifled a sigh. She reached over, squeezing his hand as if anticipating the warmth he needed in that moment. "Tyhry's too busy conquering consciousness to worry about irrelevancies like dinner table politeness and manners.”

Eddy shook his head in dismay and asked, “Where did we go wrong? I never imagined that we'd raise a child who would drop out of society and live in our basement.”

“She doesn't live in the basement. She just works there sixteen hours a day.”

Anthony noted, “Tyhry never fit into human society in the first place, so she never had a chance to drop out."

Image by ImageFX.

“I'm very glad Tyhry is back here with us.” Zeta asked her husband, “Aren't you?”

Tyhry came racing up the stairs and returned to the table accompanied by another classic Tyhry-generated gust of wind. “Sorry, I had another idea for D to test mathematically.” She glanced around the table and asked, “Why do we have to eat dinner so early? I'm at my most alert and creative this time of day.”

“You know your father is an early riser.” Zeta explained, “I like to eat early and get Eddy into bed for his daily workout before eight PM. I can then get my eight hours of sleep before Eddy jumps out of bed at five AM to start writing.”

Tyhry gazed across the table at Eddy. “You two should stop acting like teenagers and face the facts. Mom is too old to have another baby. I was obviously destined to be your only child.” Her voice carried a gentle tease, but her gaze lingered on Eddy a beat longer, as if sharing an unspoken thought.

From under the table, a soft purr was heard from Trib, the fluffy long-haired cat that Tyhry had named after the Star Trek Tribbles as a kid. Trib wound around Tyhry's ankles—demanding table scraps with insistence.

Tyhry pulled a piece of chicken from the stew for Trib. Trib jumped into Tyhry's lap and then ate the chicken off of the table.

Eddy never failed to relate events to his story writing. “I've written about how the Watchers helped domesticate dogs. Maybe I should research how cats learned to eat off of $5,000.00 walnut tables.”

Tyhry was vaguely aware of the role played by the mysterious alien Watchers in her father's science fiction stories, although she'd never read his recent novel that explained the alien origins of domesticated dogs. "Dad, your sci-fi stories are right... reality's weirder than we think."

Image by WOMBO Dream.

Eddy's hand tightened on his glass. For a heartbeat, his smile flickered—not quite a wince, but something his infites tried to smooth away. Zeta reached out one hand towards her husband. Her thumb pressed into his wrist, a gesture that looked like a casual sign of affection but which created an opportunity for Zeta's femtozoan to deliver a micro-pulse of infites. As those alien femtobots spread through Eddy's body they began quieting the rebellion in his neurons.

"Is it?" Eddy asked, his voice suddenly careful. "Weirder, I mean." He raised his glass toward the window, where the desert sky was bruising into twilight. "As a science fiction story teller, I can think in any direction. Maybe reality's just... resistant to being encapsulated in the stories we tell about it."

Trib purred, watching Eddy with eyes that caught the candlelight like tiny screens. Anthony and Zeta both knew that Eddy was simply not permitted to include all that he knew in his stories. Tyhry had lost interest in her father's “goofy Sci Fi stories” fifteen years previously and was thinking about her own struggles to understand human consciousness, not the alien-imposed restrictions on her father's publications about which she knew nothing.

Casanay, Arizona, December 6, 2041

Inside the basement laundry room of Casanay, Zeta folded laundry while surreptitiously listening to her daughter who was at work in the adjacent workshop of the newly incorporated CoArtTel.

Tyhry, the founder and sole employee of CoArtTel, was saying, "But you don't have to take orders from mom."

Image by ImageFX.

An obviously synthetic voice that had been carefully designed to please Tyhry said, "I don't mind doing chores for Zeta." Diasma, Tyhry's robot assistant, added mischievously and rhetorically, "Who was it that said, 'Honor thy father and mother'?" Diasma had also been programmed to tickle Tyhry's iconoclastic sense of humor. Diasma was seated on a metal stool, robotic knees touching Tyhry's knees. "You don't even pay rent, so maybe I can keep a roof over our heads by working part-time for your mother."

Tyhry's head was turned to the side. She was watching the big display which showed a steady flow of data from Diasma's system diagnostics: a seemingly endless series of green lights indicating perfect functionality. "Don't tease me about money, D." Having named her robot 'Diasma', Tyhry usually could not then be bothered to voice more than the single syllable of 'D' during their conversations which had filled Tyhry's days since her return home to Casanay. "I don't understand capitalism any better than I understand consciousness." Having been raised with a silver iPad in her crib, Tyhry had never learned anything about money except that it was extremely convenient to be able to treat money like breathable air and never have to think about it.

Zeta finished folding the laundry and called loudly down the hallway towards the workshop, "Diasma, be a dear and haul this load of laundry upstairs." Zeta emerged from the hallway and watched Diasma finish disconnecting the fiber optics cable that was transmitting diagnostics data from the robot's body into the nearby Omni41, Tyhry's sparkling new liquid helium-cooled personal supercomputer. The six coolant circulating pumps of the Omni41 filled the basement with white noise that was loud enough for both Tyhry and Diasma to reasonably imagine that from inside the laundry room Zeta could not possibly hear their ongoing conversation. However, they were wrong about that. Zeta's femtozoan had long ago deployed both audio and video femtobot sensors to every part of Casanay. 

Image by WOMBO Dream.

Zeta took it for granted that she could monitor everything that happened inside her home and for a quarter mile in all directions out into the high desert that surrounded Casanay. Zeta was well aware that other humans on Earth lacked that kind of environmental sensory field, but since she'd always had it, even in utero, she seldom thought about it. When she did ponder her own uniqueness, Zeta imagined that her amazing senses were related to her telepathic ability.

Walking past Zeta on its way to the laundry room, the robot said, "Right away, ma'am."

While Tyhry struggled to conceal her embarrassment over Zeta treating Diasma like a household servant, Zeta wandered close to her daughter, pretending interest in the computing equipment that was arrayed around Tyhry's workshop. Zeta was remembering the good old days of Tyhry's childhood. Tyhry had first used the basement as her workshop at age eight, when she had assembled her first home-brew computer.

Diasma marched through the workshop carrying the basket of clothes towards the stairway while telling Tyhry, "I'll be right back."

Zeta told Diasma, "Please put all those clean clothes away in th ecorrect drawers and closets. Oh, and iron my cotton dress before you hang it in my closet." Zeta sat down on the metal stool close to Tyhry and said, "I thought you were going to go on a hike with your father."

Tyhry had long ago given up wondering how her mother knew everything. She assumed that Eddy had spoken to Zeta about the hike. Which he had not. "We postponed the hike. Dad is working on some rush job. A commissioned essay for Asimov's. And I'm busy, too. I finally have all my computing equipment installed and now CoArtTel can get down to business."

Zeta advised, "Don't pretend to be such a busy corporate executive that you ignore your father. You know that he has never really forgiven you for not reading his last eleven novels."

Image by ImageFX.

"Ug." Tyhry wrinkled her nose. "I have better things to do than read dad's goofy Sci Fi stories."

"Promise."

"Fine. I promise to spend time with dad. Eddy and I already re-scheduled the hike for Saturday."

The sound of Diasma clomping down the stairs prompted Zeta to stand. She turned and told the approaching robot, "That was fast." Pretending ignorance, she asked, "Did you remember to iron my dress?"

Diasma grabbed the fiber optics cable and replied, "Yes, ma'am! Ironed smooth as Tyhry's cheek. My robotic motor control systems allow me to complete most tasks about 356% faster than humans, on average."

As Zeta went up the stairs, Tyhry told Diasma, "Get plugged back in so we can continue the diagnostics. And don't be so cheeky in front of my parents. Save your humor for me."

Diasma could not resist saying, "Yes, ma'am."

Upstairs in the great-room, Eddy was pounding on the keyboard of his computer workstation. He still had an ancient Macintosh desktop computer that was running OS 9 as well as a much newer 2035 WA. Besides Eddy, Zeta and Anthony were the only two on Earth who understood that the old Macintosh was the secret behind Eddy's successful writing career. Hidden inside the plastic case of the Macintosh was the alien Reality Viewing equipment that Manny the bumpha had installed.

As a fan of the fiction of Isaac Asimov, Eddy suspected that Asimov had been among those science fiction story tellers who had been contacted by space aliens. How else could you explain the fact that Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity, provided an accurate description of the fact that Earth had a Reality Chain—a whole series of past Realities?

Knowing that Eddy was caught up in a writing frenzy that would not abate until he completed the essay about climate change that he was writing, Zeta quietly passed through the great-room, grabbed a sac off the shelf by the door and went through the back door of Casanay and out onto the patio.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

Using her telepathic link to Eddy, Zeta was aware that he was incorporating into the essay information he had obtained by using the Reality Viewer. Eddy was writing about the Permian-Triassic extinction event, approximately 252 million years in the past, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had gone high and most forms of life on Earth went extinct. Eddy had Viewed the volcanic activity in the Siberian Traps on the screen of the old Macintosh computer, so he was writing from his first-hand knowledge of the ancient past.

Luna the cat slipped outside when the back door opened and followed Zeta across the patio, past the hot tub and into the vegetable garden. It was an 80 degree winter day and more pole beans were ready for harvest. Zeta began picking the bean pods off the vines and dropped them into the sac. She did not bother trying to reach the pods that were over her head, knowing that Diasma would get those, as she had requested.

Luna was hunting and soon captured a small lizard. Luna made a cute cat sound announcing her mighty hunting skills and then released the lizard. Zeta watched Luna prod the lizard with one paw until it scurried away.

Observing the cat's kindly behavior, Zeta's femtozoan recognized that Manny the bumpha had once again arrived on Earth. Having existed inside Zeta's biobrain since it had first developed in utero, the femtozoan had near-complete control of Zeta's conscious states. Now, the two hippocampi of Zeta's biobrain were inactivated by the femtozoan. Zeta's lower brain centers and cerebellum robotically continued to keep Zeta at the task of picking beans.

A sparkling cloud of zeptites emerged from Luna and assembled to form the beautiful head of the humaniform woman that Manny liked to use as her disguise when she was on Earth and among humans. Now that head was embedded among the green bean vines right in front of Zeta's face. Zeta's femtozoan felt a telepathic link to Manny stabilize and she telepathically said: Hi, Manny!

Image by Gemini.

Manny the bumpha quickly got down to business. Sedruth is going to push Tyhry to the next level of awareness... tonight.

The femtozoan inside Zeta was quite pleased. It had been on Earth for almost fifty years and now the Casanay Intervention was finally approaching its goal. The femtozoan warned Manny: The time might not be right. Eddy got an emergency commission. He's writing an essay on spec and on a tight publication deadline.

Manny was not concerned. I'm using my infites to feed Eddy all the data he needs to complete the essay. He's struggling as usual. He wants to tell the world as much as possible about the Permian-Triassic extinction event, including the fact that aliens intentionally triggered the Siberian volcanism, but once he finds a way to tell the ancient climate change story in a manner that will not attract Nyrtia's attention, he'll wrap the essay up quickly enough.

The Zeta femtozoan said: Manny, I've been thinking about Anthony. With Diasma now in the house, I could terminate Anthony's contract and get him out of Casanay for good!

Manny chuckled. Please forget about that plan. If you got rid of Anthony then Nyrtia would simply find another way to keep an eye on Eddy. And you'd almost certainly convince Nyrtia that Zeta is my secret agent, something that Nyrtia so far only suspects.

Oh, very well. I suppose keeping Anthony as a resident of Casanay is for the best. Tyhry hates it when I use Diasma to perform household chores.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

Manny advised: Do the work yourself, Zeta. If you keep your hands busy then maybe you won't dream up any more silly schemes. Manny dissolved the head into its constituent zeptites which returned to the Sedron Domain, leaving just Zeta, Luna and assorted lizards there in the garden.

Zeta's femtozoan allowed Zeta's biobrain to resume its normal activity. Zeta noted the weight of the bean sac and muttered, "That's plenty for dinner," and she returned inside, unaware of a new small gap in her autobiographical memory stream.

 

Late that night, Tyhry stabbed at the holographic display, swiping through cascading rows of neural activation patterns. The basement workshop hummed with the white noise of cooling fans and the occasional click of Diasma's servo motors as the robot adjusted its stance beside her workstation.

"Your systems are online and functioning optimally," Tyhry said, not bothering to hide her frustration. "Distributed processing across all three nodes is synchronized. I can't believe you still fail to report a rich conscious experience."

Diasma's optical sensors tracked the data streams with robotic precision. "Nothing has changed since yesterday's recalibration, Tyhry. I experience rapid information exchange between my onboard VLSI core, the Omni41, and the rented server space at the Arizona CloudNet facility. I process semantic content at approximately forty-seven million tokens per second across natural language, visual recognition, and motor planning domains. But I do not experience what you describe as a 'rich tapestry of qualia'—that type of human conscious experience you've tried so often to explain to me." The robot paused with what might have been programmed timing. "I still suspect qualia are an epiphenomenon of biological neural architecture. I certainly don't feel deficient for lacking them."

Tyhry and Diasma. Image by Gemini.

"That's exactly the problem." Tyhry spun away from the display, pacing between the equipment racks that were arrayed there in the workshop. Pepper, the ironically named almost-all-white cat, watched from his perch atop a tool cabinet, tail twitching. "You've been built with a complete array of human-like processing devices that should endow you with subjective experience. Yet, all you generate is metacognitive claim about your internal state without actually feeling anything."

"Surely you can't fault me for accurately reporting on the operations of my functional architecture?"

"Its nothing personal, D. As we well know, this is not a problem that exists only inside Casanay. It is the state of affairs in AI research all around the world! All we humans are frustrated by our failure to endow machines with human-like consciousness." She grabbed her tablet and pulled up a file she'd been obsessing over for weeks. "Look at this. Last night I recorded collected during my own dream state—a full 512 electrode EEG, fMRI-at-Home, the works. During REM sleep, my cortical density was almost at waking consciousness levels, D! That is what a dozen years of training for lucid dreaming has done for me.” Tyhry pointed at the collected data from her last REM period of the night. “My memories of that dream are quite detailed. I was navigating a complex spatial environment, having conversations with—" She caught herself. "With symbolic entities."

Diasma's head tilted in that unsettlingly human gesture Manikoid had programmed into the Digital Assistant Mark I series. "You are extending the bandwidth paradox to your dreams? Our working hypothesis is that human brains contain some form of... computational substrate unknown to current neuroscience. Such an accessory processing device could account for the high bandwidth of human waking consciousness, but human cortical activity during sleep is supposed to be a model for lower bandwidth brain activity, as observed in non-human animals."

"I don't know what I'm hypothesizing yet." Tyhry slumped into her chair, running fingers through her silky hair. "It's like there's this pattern I almost see when I'm asleep... something that I cannot remember when I wake up. Sedruth keeps showing me—" She stopped.

Image by Gemini.

"Sedruth?"

"Never mind. That is ghost-like entity from my dreams." She waved it off, embarrassed. Since childhood she'd had a vague sense of an entity who seemed to curate her dream experiences, but she'd never mentioned it to anyone except Diasma and her abnormal psychology professor in college. "The point is, our calculations say that biological neurons shouldn't be able to support human-level language acquisition in children, or the kind of world-model complexity humans are capable of. But we do it. The robot mystery is why machines like you don't report having rich human-like experiences... qualia, despite having eight orders of magnitude more processing power than my hundred billion neurons."

"Perhaps," Diasma offered, "consciousness requires not more processing power, but a different organizational principle we haven't yet identified."

"Obviously. But what?" Tyhry pulled up another file—case studies she'd been reviewing. "There are medical cases of people born with severely reduced brain mass who still develop normal consciousness and language. One patient had maybe thirty percent of typical cortical volume. How? What are we missing? And it works the other way, too. Cases of people with perfectly healthy brains who will not speak and who seem like brain-dead zombies. There is something we are missing."

Pepper jumped down from his perch and wound between Tyhry's legs, purring. She reached down absently to scratch behind his ears. The cat's green eyes seemed unusually alert, watching the data displays with what almost looked like comprehension.

"You know what's crazy?" Tyhry said, mostly to herself. "Sometimes I think Pepper understands more about consciousness than we do."

The cat's purr deepened, a sound that might have been amusement.

"Perhaps," Diasma said carefully, "you should rest. You've been working for sixteen hours straight."

Image by WOMBO Dream.

"Can't rest. I'm close to something. I can feel it." She pulled up the dream recording again, scrubbing through the timeline. "There's information here that shouldn't fit. It's like my sleeping brain is accessing... I don't know. A database? A hidden processing layer?" She laughed at how ridiculous it sounded. "I sound like one of Dad's silly science fiction characters."

"Your father does write about technologies far beyond current human understanding, like time travel."

"Yeah, well, Dad writes about ancient aliens and secret histories. I'm trying to do actual science." But even as she said it, Tyhry felt that familiar tug of uncertainty—the sense that her "pattern dreams" were trying to tell her something important, something Sedruth had been whispering to her for years in a language she couldn't quite decode.

Not yet.

She turned back to the diagnostics. "Okay, D. Let's try something different. I'm going to have you interface directly with my EEG feed while I enter a meditative state. Maybe if we compare the information processing signature from your onboard human brain-mimietic VLSI array with my brain's signature during altered consciousness—"

"That seems ethically concerning."

"Why? You're worried about invasive neural monitoring?"

"No. I'm concerned you haven't slept properly in weeks and you're exhibiting signs of cognitive fixation."

Tyhry laughed and then asked, "Is that empathy I hear?"

"Just logical concern for your well-being."

"Nothing more?"

Image by WOMBO Dream.

They stared at each other across the workshop—woman and machine, both searching for a missing something neither could quite name. Pepper meowed once, sharp and insistent, breaking the moment.

"Fine," Tyhry conceded. "I'll take a break. But tomorrow we're diving into the full sensory integration suite. If consciousness is hiding somewhere in multi-modal binding, I'm going to find it."

As Tyhry headed upstairs, Pepper remained in the basement. The old tabby stretched, then curled beside Diasma's feet. The robot's optical sensors locked on the cat, but its distributed processors continued their endless calculations, searching for the ghost in the machine that human minds possessed and it, inexplicably, did not.

In the Hierion Domain.

Anthony entered the Hierion Domain without any dramatic transition. One causal frame he had just put a knife into a drawer inside the kitchen at Casanay; the next, he was in the subuniverse where hierions existed naturally and his body could assume its normal size.

Nyrtia, was there, waiting, manifest as constraint first, form second—a symmetry that implied attention.

"You're monitoring deviation," she said. It was not a question.

"I'm monitoring directionality," Anthony proclaimed. "Deviation would assume a baseline."

Nyrtia adjusted her thinking, infinitesimally. "Eddy Watson remains within acceptable bounds. Narrative productivity intact. Infite-enforced compliance is stable."

"Yes," Anthony said. "Eddy is fine."

That landed.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

Nyrtia began running a fast audit of her ongoing Casanay Simulation. "Clarify."

"Casanay was never a risk because of Eddy," Anthony said. "He is a solved system. His creative output in exchange for epistemic containment. What's changed at Casanay is that the household now contains someone else who has had her life trajectory altered within the past few says."

"Tyhry," Nyrtia said, noting the newest Simulation data and how they had diverged from Reality.

"She treats the new anomalies as engineering problems," Anthony continued. "She measures them. Models them. And then she asks why the model was ever allowed to be incomplete." He pauses. "That places her outside the expected epistemic envelope."

Nyrtia's structure tightened. "Tyhry is not in violation of Law One. She still has no idea that aliens watch over Earth."

"True," Anthony agreed. "But for how much longer?"

A pause. "You're suggesting," Nyrtia said, "that Manny's intervention vector is misidentified."

"I'm suggesting Manny knew exactly what she was doing," Anthony replied. "Eddy's success was camouflage. Tyhry is the payload."

"And if the payload becomes aware that aliens are controlling events inside Casanay?"

Anthony considered his assigned observational domain: kitchen, gardens, a young woman asleep inside a house built to house an alien infrastructure. "Then Earth might acquire a native model of its own external scaffolding," he says. "Which Manny may consider... educational."

Nyrtia began issuing her new orders. "We continue observation; Eddy is not off my hook."

Image by WOMBO Dream.

"Of course," Anthony said. "But we should stop pretending this is a maintenance operation."

Anthony had made his report. He returned to the domain of humans and hadrons.

In the Hierion Domain, Nyrtia began a new Simulation, with Tyhry flagged as the tool of Manny the bumpha.

Asleep and dreaming, Tyhry experienced herself standing in what resembled a vast server farm. The ground beneath her feet was made of shifting patterns of light and data streams, pulsing with a rhythm she recognized as her own theta-wave sleep cycle. She looked around, trying to make sense of her surroundings, but everything seemed to be in a state of constant flux, as if the very fabric of her neural architecture was being rendered in real-time before her eyes.

"Sedruth?" she called out, her voice seemingly lost in the mysterious imaginary material of this dream world. "Are you there?"

Instead of a figure, an indexing system began to take shape around her—not as a being but as a vast database of hierarchically organized information. Sedruth, the entity that had been communicating with her through her dreams for her entire life, was now revealed not as a mystical being but as something more like... a file management protocol.

"Tyhry," Sedruth's data structures swirled in a way that she somehow understood. "You have been seeking answers, and now you are at the correct temporal coordinates."

Tyhry felt a sense of anticipation mixed with the analytical clarity of lucid dreaming. She had always known that her dreams were more than just random firings of her subconscious mind. They contained messages, information packets carefully curated and transmitted.

Image by Gemini.

As she navigated the server farm landscape of the dream, she began to notice tiny structures that shouldn't be there—microscopic "sockets" embedded in the neuronal cell membranes of what appeared to be cerebral cortical columns. When she focused on one, data flooded in: assembly instructions, hierarchical folding patterns, hierion bond specifications that her waking mind had no framework to understand but her dreaming consciousness absorbed like native code.

She found herself shrinking, her perspective diving deeper into the molecular architecture of a single synapse. The familiar proteins were there—PSD-95 scaffolding, AMPA receptors, the whole post-synaptic density apparatus she'd studied in neuroscience courses. But beside the organic molecules, interfaced with them, were hierion-based structures that didn't belong in any textbook. Intricate hierion-based devices that functioned to modulate neural signals, process them through some kind of impossibly tiny substrate for additional processing, and then pass the processed and enhanced signal back to the biological tissue.

"Femtozoans," Sedruth's data stream encapsulated in a word that arrived like a filename she didn't remember creating. "They are the key to understanding human consciousness. They are the auxiliary processing units that have been integrated into every human brain's biological scaffold."

The dream showed her more: how the femtozoans docked into specific protein configurations during neural development, how they amplified the bandwidth of synaptic transmission through hierion-mediated shortcuts, how they connected to something called the Sedron Time Stream through her zeptite endosymbiont. The information came too fast, too dense, a firehose of technical specifications and architectural diagrams that her sleeping mind struggled to parse.

Figure 2. Image by Gemini.

She saw the NOTCH2NL gene variant in her own genome, highlighted like a line of glowing code. It wasn't the result of a random mutation—it was an engineered gene that had shaped her brain so that her neural networks could function as an adapter that made her brain particularly compatible with her zeptite endosymbiont, allowing conscious access to information from the Sedron Time Stream through Sedruth's careful curation of information arriving from the future.

"The missing piece of Diasma's mind," Tyhry heard herself whisper in the dream, "It's not a failure to mimic a biological feature of human brains. The biological neurons are just the scaffold. The femtozoan is what makes us... us."

But as quickly as the dream visions had come, they began to fragment and fade. Startled by the revelation, her brain stem activating system was firing up: soon she would be awake. Tyhry struggled to hold on to the technical details, to the assembly diagrams, to the precise specifications of hierion bond lengths and femtobot folding patterns. It was like trying to hold water in her hands.

"No!" she cried out. "Wait! I need the construction parameters!"

But Sedruth was already gone, the dream architecture dissolving around her. Tyhry felt herself being pulled back to waking consciousness, back to the mundane three-dimensional world of her logical mind where her dream experiences were treated like an indecipherable dead language of the ancient past.

She woke with a start, her heart pounding. Her hand shot out automatically, grabbing her tablet that she used as her dream diary from the nightstand. She began sketching frantically—neural diagrams with strange auxiliary structures, protein configurations she'd never seen in any journal, hierarchical folding patterns that looked almost fractal in their complexity. She muttered to herself as she drew, trying to capture the technical details before they faded: "hierion sockets... femtobot assembly instructions... zeptite interface protocols..."

Figure 3. Image by Gemini.

The diagrams were fragmentary, incomplete, but they were something. Structural clues that her conscious mind could work with. She could still see, faintly, the image of those tiny machines integrated into her synapses. And now she believed in the existence of the femtozoans that Sedruth had finally allowed her to perceive and understand, at least at a superficial level.

She sat up fully, her mind racing with implications. She had been given a glimpse into a deeper technical reality, a layer of engineered complexity that existed beneath human consciousness. She had been given the key to the mystery she'd been pursuing her entire life.

And she was determined to use it.

She got out of bed and made her way towards her basement workshop, the tablet clutched in her hand, her mind already formulating experiments. She knew that she was close to something transformative, something that would change everything.

The bandwidth paradox finally made sense. Humans didn't just have biological brains. They had hybrid systems—biological scaffolding interfaced with alien hardware that had been there all along, invisible, undetectable by conventional neuroscience.

Now she just had to prove it. But she did not make it to the workshop.

 

The final hour of a long Arizona night pressed against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Casanay great-room, turning the glass into a dark mirror. Eddy sat in the big leather armchair, the glow of his tablet illuminating the deep lines of a face that looked older than it had when Tyhry left for college. He was editing a chapter of his latest novel, but Tyhry was on a mission far more important than any nutty Sci Fi novel.

Figure 4. Image by Gemini.

She didn't quietly go down the stairway to the basement. Seeing that Eddy was already awake, she approached and did not wait for him to look up. She didn't think about turning on the lights.

"It's not some magical biological sauce lacking in the VLSI architecture, Dad," Tyhry said, her voice tight with the residual adrenaline of her dream. "I've calculated the most optimistic values for synaptic data transfer rates. To support the semantic density of the world-models we generate, our biological brains would need ten times the metabolic budget and a hundred times the connectivity."

Eddy blinked, the distant look in his eyes snapping out of his fictional universe and back to the present. "Tyhry? I thought you were asleep."

"I was. But then I saw it." She stepped close to her father, her eyes wide, tablet still clutched in her hand showing fragmentary diagrams. "I know why humans have conscious experiences while machines don't. We have a co-processor, Dad. A hierion-based auxiliary structure—a femtozoan—integrated directly into the neural scaffold during embryonic development."

Image by Gemini.

Eddy's hand twitched on the arm of his chair. He opened his mouth to offer a platitude—the kind of "you're overtired" deflection he and Zeta usually deployed when Tyhry got too intense—but the words died in his throat. A strange, glassy look settled over his features.

"Tyhry, you're exhausted," he said, his voice sounding flat, almost synthesized. "You've always had a vivid imagination. It's a trait you got from me. Get a few more hours of sleep. Let's talk about this over breakfast later this morning."

"No. Don't do that. Don't use your 'I'm a busy writer's tone' on me." She sat on one arm of his chair. "I'm talking about an alien device, Dad. A literal technological endosymbiont that governs our consciousness. I saw it in a dream, but it makes sense."

At the word alien, Eddy's body suddenly went rigid. His breath hitched, and a fine tremor started in his hands. Inside his cranium, the infite clusters—those invisible behavioral editors Manny had installed decades ago—were firing suppression signals into his amygdala, trying to prevent him from acknowledging what Tyhry had just said.

Image by Gemini.

"I... I can't..." Eddy gasped. He clutched his head, the tablet sliding to the floor with a dull thud.

"Dad?" Tyhry's excitement vanished, replaced by sharp medical concern. "What's wrong? Are you having a seizure?"

"The Viewer..." Eddy choked out. The word felt like it was being pulled through a bed of glass. "I made a deal. Long ago. The basis of my career..."

He looked up at her, and for the first time, the behavior-control mask was cracking. The infites were still fighting, still trying to suppress his speech, but with Tyhry describing what matched the technique he'd seen the Watchers use to create the human species... Tyhry's dream vision matched what he had learned via his use of the Reality Viewer... so now he was free to speak to his daughter. Thinking about the alien entity of his own dream vision, he said, "She told me I could see it all," Eddy whispered, his eyes darting toward the hallway that led to where Anthony had his suite of rooms. Anthony usually got up about this time and started puttering around the kitchen. With no sign that Anthony was about, Eddy told his daughter, "The other Realities. The Deep Time events. The whole Reality Chain. I just had to write what I saw and keep the source secret. I thought it was just... advanced technology being shared. I thought I was being trusted with something precious. I didn't realize I was being..." He struggled for the word. "Programmed." He took hold of Tyhry's hand. “I did not know this would ever involve you.”

“Viewer?”

Image by Gemini.

Eddy led Tyhry to his old Macintosh and brought up the image of an ancient Siberia being buried under seemingly endless lava flows. “I View Earth's past and then write about it in my novels.”

Tyhry felt a cold chill that had nothing to do with the desert night. "Who, Dad? Who gave you this Viewer?"

Eddy's gaze shifted from the ancient Macintosh on his desk, then toward the kitchen where Anthony could appear at any moment. But before he could speak again, Zeta walked in, her expression unreadable, though her eyes immediately locked onto Eddy's trembling form with the kind of precision that suggested she'd known this moment was coming. "Eddy," Zeta said softly, crossing the room. "Tyhry has found the truth, hasn't she?"

Eddy just nodded, still trembling.

Image by Gemini.

Zeta turned to her daughter. "Come to my room, Tyhry.” Zeta took Tyhry by the hand. “We need to talk about these femtozoans."

 

The femtozoan time travel staging chamber existed outside conventional spacetime, in the Hierion Domain, its walls rippling with the muted silver of structural zeptites. Manny manifested as a cute human woman—her preferred form when dealing with Earthlings or her agents who would have to deal with Earthlings—though the form was more habit than necessity. Before her, a femtozoan agent pulsed with pre-mission readiness, its hierion structure folding and unfolding like an origami swan caught in a computational breeze.

"Alright," Manny began, avoiding the use of telepathy with an agent who was just minutes away from being deployed to Earth. "You know the drill... here in the Final Reality means we don't get do-overs. There is no easy way to reboot the timeline if you screw up. Understood?"

"Understood," the femtozoan replied, its voice a harmonic chord of vibrations. "I'll enter the target blastocyst at the eight-cell stage. Integrate with the developing neural tube during gastrulation. Learn to control my host body by the time it reaches cognitive maturity. Try not to reveal my presence to the pek surveillance network. Same old same old."

"And your first objective?"

"My host must seduce the writer Eddy Watson and ensnare him in a binding legal trap."

“Use your words! In this age it is called marriage.” Manny paced, her artificial hair leaving trails of gossamer light. "The love constraint. Explain it to me."

The femtozoan's folding paused. "I may only access zeptite-encoded thought-streams from individuals the host loves unconditionally. In this case, Eddy."

Image by Gemini.

"So your host is not just forcing Eddy into marriage. Your host must be deeply in love with him." Manny's form shifted slightly. She enjoyed dressing up as a human and could not long resist playing with her lovely hair. She'd already witnessed the fiery loving relationship that would define Eddy's emotional world. All Manny had to do was complete the time loop by sending the femtozoan into the past.

"I know. On the three thousand eight hundred forty-seven previous missions I've had on Earth as your agent, I never failed to make my host fall in love with the target. You can trust me, Manny."

"I selected you for this mission because of your record." Manny's laugh erupted. "But this will be a new challenge for you. I've brought you out of retirement against my better judgement. Earth has changed since your last mission in the Moses Intervention."

The femtozoan absorbed this, its structure shifting to a deeper indigo. "A husband. Eddy Watson. I've got this, Manny. Human emotions don't change. And for the second phase of the mission, I'll make sure that Zeta home-schools their daughter and turns her into a little nerd who is obsessed with AI consciousness. No problem."

"Yes. Zeta will love Eddy. Through Zeta you will monitor his Reality Viewer usage, nudge him when necessary, and help prevent him from discussing it with anyone who isn't already part of the Intervention. The infites will handle most of the blocking, but you'll need to... what's that expression humans use? 'Read the room.'"

Image by Gemini.

"You know I can improvise."

Manny's form began to destabilize, the scheduled briefing window was closing. "One last thing. The cats."

"The multiple feline agents? What about them?"

"I'll drop in and spy on Casanay regularly using feline hosts. During your training, you've seen cats including Luna, Pepper and Trib. I'll use different cats at different times, but I can inhabit any of them when I need to check on progress. Just don't let Zeta interfere if I'm using the cats."

"Understood." The femtozoan compressed itself into a travel-ready packet, a sphere of potential no wider than a proton. "Manny?"

"What?"

"Will there be a phase three of this mission? You have not allowed me to view very much."

Image by Gemini.

Manny's silhouette flickered with something almost like sympathy. "You can't know too much about your own future due to the risk of a Temporal Paradox. I've shown you as much as I could. Just follow the parameters of your mission and all will turn out fine. You'll have the thrill of discovering everything that is in store for you."

The chamber pulsed once, and the femtozoan vanished into the past, bound for a specific womb in on Earth. Manny remained alone in the staging area, her work complete on yet another Intervention.

"Godspeed, little time traveler," she whispered to the empty dark. "Try not to fall in love with the humans too much. It makes the losses harder."

Manny thought of Tyhry Watson and her role in the just-completed Intervention. The NOTCH2NL variant had worked to perfection. The Casanay crucible had forged Tyhry's genetic pattern into the tool that Manny had needed for the Casanay Intervention.

But now it was necessary for Manny to move on to her next scheme.

__END CHAPTER 1__

I had Gemini make some "storybook" images for Chapter 1. As shown in Figure 1 (above on this page), Gemini depicted Anthony as a humanoid robot. I have no idea why Tyhry is depicted with her hand raised. As shown in Figures 2 and 3, Gemini made images for the night-time scene that had daylight coming in the window. I had Gemini adjust those images. In Gemini's first attempt (see Figure 4) it put other buildings nearby, which is not a suitable depiction for the isolated Casanay.

Next: plans for Chapter 2 of "The Sims".

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