Ta Ta

I've never been a good traveler. However, my mother and sister have often visited England, claiming that they were investigating ancestral links: distant relatives who lived in England before anyone in the family moved to the New World. Now Zeta informs me that there is another type of link between my family and England.

For perhaps millions of years the Grendels guided the evolution of protohumans and humans on Earth. Now, the tryp'At seem to be functioning as Earth Overseers and they may be trying to enforce a rule against tryp'At residing on Earth. This becomes pertinent if I am tryp'At.

Part 8 of Yōd on Earth (Part 1)(Part 2)(Part 3)(Part 4)(Part 5)(Part 6)(Part 7)

I was not present when my mother died, but according to my sister, her last words were, "Ta Ta, for now." Growing up, I heard my mother use a thousand little quaint sayings, many of which I never heard anyone else deploy in their speech. In the case of "ta ta", that was also used by the mother of my best childhood friend. I recently mentioned this to Zeta.

Aunt Mayness (1974)

Zeta told me, "Well, Aunt Mayness and her sister were both tryp'At. They grew up in a society where individuals were designed to move their consciousness between bodies in much the same way that humans might change clothes. They used 'ta ta' to mean something like: 'keep up the good work until we return to our own bodies'."

"Wait a minute. I thought Aunt Mayness was Trysta Iwedon, in disguise."

Trysta: Foundations

Zeta shrugged, "You mean that you assumed Trysta made use of nanites to alter her appearance and take on the physical form of Aunt Mayness."

I asked, "How else would she disguise herself as another woman?"

Zeta shrugged, "I'm not sure I should say. This is the sort of stuff that that got Ivory kicked off of Earth."

Yōd looked up from her tablet computer and said, "And besides, the truth might blow his mind."

The Ivory Infites

Zeta replied to Yōd, "He's had the knowledge of replicoid capabilities for years. This is nothing new."

Yōd gave her head a violent little shake, "He's been cognitively closed to the possibility of mind transfer."

I complained, "I wish you two would stop trying to protect me. I'd prefer to know the truth."

Zeta snickered, "No, you don't."

Yōd added, "You've repeatedly been told this truth and each time you've requested that the facts be scrubbed from your mind. There's no point in going through all that again."

After a moment of reflection I suggested, "Let's try the fiction gambit."

Trysta and Grean

Zeta laughed, "Ya, right. We're talking about a genie that won't go back in the bottle."

Yōd asked, "Fiction gambit?"

Zeta explained, "If the thinks the truth is fiction, then he can remain on Earth while knowing a hidden truth."

Yōd muttered, "Risky. How can the tryp'At Overseers know if he believes a truth? In the past, they've always kept this particular truth hidden from Earthlings."

I suggested, "By the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact, Earthling can know the truth as long as the truth is disguised as fiction."

Yōd

Yōd objected, "None of us have seen the text of the Pact. There may be some truths that will never be made known to Earthlings."

Zeta wondered, "Maybe he has been pushed and guided to reach a cognitive state where the truth about the tryp'At can be viewed and understood as fiction. This truth may be so fantastic that he can't believe it to be true."

Yōd was skeptical, "That wasn't the case when Ivory told him the truth and it wasn't the case last year when you told him."

Zeta jumped to her feet and began to pace. "Okay...hypothetically... what if the tryp'At were designed to provide a way around the restrictions of the Trysta-Grean Pact, as a way to allow for a group of Earth Overseers to continue working after the end of time travel and after all non-humans had been removed from Earth."

700 Investigations

I nodded. "And if I am tryp'At, I must be biologically indistinguishable from an Earth human."

Yōd sighed loudly and interjected, "This isn't about your genes."

Zeta placed her hand over Yōd's mouth, "Shut up." She looked at me and continued, "What do you think would be involved when moving a tryp'At agent to Earth?"

"I've been imagining that tryp'At can be created on Earth from two complementary human genomes, using specialized gene-sculpting nanites. That's the only way I can imagine that a tryp'At would be allowed to remain on Earth."

source

Zeta wanted to be quite sure that she understood my idea. "If such a tryp'At were genetically constructed from human genetic material?"

"Exactly."

Yōd asked, "What if there were thousands of such genetic constructs on Earth? Would they all be tryp'At?"

Suddenly I realized just what Yōd and Zeta were trying to tell me. I shrugged. "Don't tell me that such genetically specialized humans are only receptacles... competent to become tryp'At..."

Yōd pranced out of the room and Zeta went back to her work. All she said was, "Ok."

source

I found myself unable to speak further about the idea of humans like myself and my mother being receptacles for the tryp'At minds that need to function on Earth. Maybe this fit in with what I've recently learned about Mars. I wondered: Is there a colony of tryp'At on Mars? Did my mother return to Mars and leave behind nothing but a receptacle body here on Earth?

I believe that my recent discussions with Yōd and Zeta concerning the tryp'At have triggered old memories that were given to me by Ivory. Ivory tried to warn me that in the Ekcolir Reality, the tryp'At first operated primarily out of a secret base in England. Unfortunately, those old memories seem to have been scrambled. Now more than ever, I fear that my family and I have been engineered to be "puppets" of the tryp'At and we have been forced to play our specified roles here on the stage of Earth.

Next: investigating the end of telepathy

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Mars 123

Image credits: this image was made using
three images created by Ludovic Celle. See:
Mars canyon 01, Martian Oasis, and
Green Mars 01. This new composite image
(M1A2R3S) depicts an imaginary book cover
and is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

Mars 123 tells the story of what happens next to the Editor after the events described in Exit Edit. Sadly, there does not seem to be a copy of Mars 123 on Earth.

Part 7 of Yōd on Earth (Part 1)(Part 2)(Part 3)(Part 4)(Part 5)(Part 6)

M1A2R3S
Today I was discussing time travel with Zeta. Several years ago, back when I was told by Ivory that time travel became impossible sometime late in the 20th century, I was both skeptical and disappointed. It would be wonderful if those of us here in 2017 could be provided with a convincing demonstration of time travel.

Zeta insists that I have been a time traveler and she has consistently encouraged me to make efforts to access old suppressed memories of my trips through time. Zeta keeps telling me that I might not be able to experience those suppressed memories in a normal fashion. Today, when we had again reached that point in our discussion of time travel, Yōd looked up from her tablet and joined the conversation.

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Michael Whelan.

Yōd said to Zeta, "You might shake loose some of his suppressed memories if you told him about the Martians."

Zeta muttered, "Ivory got kicked off of Earth for that."

Yōd shrugged, "Don't be such a coward."

I asked, "What about Martians?"

Zeta replied, "One of the stories that the Dead Widowers published was about Mars, but the tryp'At Overseers erased that little publishing effort from history and Ivory got her ticket off of Earth."

Somehow that revelation matched with an idea that was already in my head. I wondered if Yōd had been correct and old memories were being triggered just by me thinking about Mars and the idea of Martians. I tried fishing for information that might be common knowledge on the worlds of the Galactic Core. I asked, "Two billion years ago, when the pek arrived in our galaxy, did they find life on both Earth and Mars?"

Click image to enlarge. (source) image credits

Yōd exclaimed triumphantly, "See!"

I didn't know what she meant. I wondered out loud, "See what?"

Zeta scowled at Yōd, then she replied, "Yes, the pek found life on Mars when they arrived. However, their main interest in Mars concerned extracting the planet's sedrons."

Zeta fell silent and I believe she would have let the matter drop. I was aware of the fact that the real source of Huaoshy power and technological dominance in the universe depended on their sedron monopoly. The main job of the pek was to extract all readily available deposits of sedrons, depriving other life forms of access to naturally occurring sedronic matter.

source

I was lost in a train of thought about the Huaoshy and sedrons when Yōd added, "According to Ivory, there was a Nereid base on Mars and-"

Zeta complained, "There's no evidence for that!"

Yōd never paused, "...and there will be a future base for Martians."

Zeta was glaring at Yōd, but I hardly noticed. In my mind I could see a strange "dream scene" that has haunted me my whole life. For many years I'd imagined it was a scene set at Observer Base on the Moon, but now I no longer believe that there was ever actually an alien facility under the surface of the Moon.

But what about Mars?

source

That thought triggered an odd memory fragment to bubble up in my mind. I've long suspected that somehow my family was constructed as a device for inserting a tyrp'At agent into Earth's timeline, an agent who would play the role of "the Editor". Part of that family was my "uncle" George.

I never knew if George had any real genetic relationship to me. The first time I ever met him was right after I had died. I can only remember an image of George and my parents talking; I have no idea what they were talking about... I was just a little kid. However, the last time I ever saw George has returned to my awareness after decades of that memory being blocked. That occasion may have been the only time that George actually spoke to me.

in the Ekcolir Reality

At the time, (I was about 12 years old) what George told me made no sense. I realize now that he was trying to warn me about my future, particularly the fact that Gohrlay would come into my life. George warned me to never think that I could trust a woman and he put it in a strange way: "You never know. A woman who you think you know might actually be from Mars."

When I was 12, I laughed at George's remark about Mars. He looked at me rather sternly, took my hand in his, and asked me to promise to not forget what he had told me. Now I am left wondering if Gohrlay really did "come from Mars" and if she has returned to that world. The tryp'At seem to be enforcing restrictions on who can reside on Earth. It may be that Gohrlay, having originated in Deep Time, had too many bumpha-derived genes. She might be more comfortable on another world.

source

Lately, I've gone back and forth in my speculations about Gohrlay's fate. Sometimes I have imagined that she is still here on Earth, in hiding. Other times, I feel that she was teleported off of Earth and is now on some planet of the Galactic Core. But now I must wonder if she is on Mars. Ivory tried to tell me the truth and I might have once actually traveled to a future time when I will join Gohrlay on Mars.

Next: Part 8 of Yōd on Earth;  investigating the tryp'At

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