The Completed Experiment

What is Manny brewing up?

Below on this blog page is Chapter 6 of a science fiction story titled "Plūribus ē Spatium". To make my version of Chapter 6, I started with the 5,200 word-long first draft that had been generated by Claude. My version of the chapter is close to 5,100 words. 

As part of my effort to put an end to Claude's endless obsession wit tea, I have Marda say, "No tea for me," in Chapter 6. The image that is shown to the right was generated by WOMBO Dream and I'll call it a depiction of Manny bringing tea to Claude.

I had Gemini generate some 'storybook' illustrations for Chapter 6. As usual, I asked that the images be generated in the style of "high resolution movie stills", but Gemini almost never complies with that request. Gemini invented a strange appearance the tryp'At, as seen in the illustrations shown below.

Chapter 6 – Experiment Complete (Ch 1)(Ch 2)(Ch 3)(Ch 4)(Ch 5)

Scene 1: Casanay Rendezvous

Marda and Tyhry. Image generated by Gemini.

Marda arrived back in the Final Reality, arriving inside Tyhry's bedroom suite of Casanay as though she had simply walked through a door. She immediately sensed the telepathic mind pattern of Tyhry. I hoped you'd be here. Marda quickly went down the hallway.

Tyhry was in the great room, watching the late afternoon light working its way across the desert. She had been home for two hours, anticipating for Marda's arrival. She turned when she sensed Marda's telepathic mind pattern and watched as Marda entered the great room from the hallway.

Image generated by Gemini.

Marda, as a femtobot replicoid, had not aged or changed her appearance significantly after the decades of simulated time that had passed inside the Asha Simulation. Marda had shifted her body form back to its conventional human shape and used her clothing nanites to provide herself with the kind of clothing that Tyhry's parents would expect her to wear. She was carrying something small in her closed right hand.

"Welcome back," Tyhry said. Tyhry was using her tryp'At body form.

Marda rushed across the room and the two women embraced and shared a long passionate kiss. "I brought a gift from Asha." She opened her hand. In her palm was a carved depiction of one of the cats of Asha that Tarynon had bred. She set it on the low table beside the couch. "Hello, Eddy."

Image generated by Gemini.

Eddy finally turned his swivel chair and took his eyes off of the computer display on his desk. He said, “Nice to see you, Marda. Tyhry warned me to expect your arrival. Are you hungry? Anthony is making dinner."

Tyhry had a weak telepathic link to her mother. She telepathically signaled to Zeta: Marda is here.

From the kitchen came the sound of Anthony where he was busy with the dinner preparation. “We are grilling Baldies and using Rylla's sauce.”

Marda looked outside through the back window and saw smoke rising from the grill on the patio. Tending the cooking fish was the replicoid copy of Tyhry, T1, who routinely lived at Casanay. Marda thought about the taste of her mother's cooking. While on the Simulated Asha, Marda had seldom eaten food, living as a tryp'At and allowing her invisibly small feeding nanites to directly shuttle nutrients into her crop.

Image generated by Gemini.

Zeta arrived from the hallway and embraced Marda. "Another galactic traveler breezes in. Do sit down," Zeta said. "Do you want tea?"

T1 came inside from the patio. She was using Tyhry's conventional Earth human body form and she nodded to Marda. T1 was telepathically examining Marda's thoughts and could sense that Marda was time-constrained. T1 told Marda: We could quickly teleport Rylla over.

Marda replied: I'll catch up with mom another time.

Anthony brought a pitcher of iced tea from the kitchen, but Marda shook her head. “No tea for me. I'm in a bit of a hurry. I don't want to be away from my daughter for too long.”

Image generated by Gemini.

"Tell us the news from Asha," Tyhry said. They all settled around Eddy's computer workstation. Tyhry telepathically told Marda: I've Viewed the Simulated version of Asha through the years. You can use Eddy's Viewer to see it live.

Marda sat down and getting right to the results of the Asha telepathy experiment she said, "The human telepaths of Asha are genuinely happy. The telepathic bonds between the humans are strong and the shared mind-space of the village has developed a richness and complexity that is fun to observe and participate in. The art alone—" she paused. "Eddy, I hope have seen the art. Music, textiles, painting. Every surface of every building is beautiful."

Eddy gestured towards his big display screen and he told Marda, "Tyhry provided me with access to the accelerated Simulation. I've been Viewing bits an pieces of the community on Asha during this past hour. I'm particularly intrigued by the spaceship that is being constructed inside the simulation of Asha."

Image generated by Gemini.

Marda saw that the display screen was showing what appeared to be video of Oryen and Tarynon installing an anti-gravity pod for the spaceship that was being built on Asha. T1 commented, “I'm glad to see that they are using the anti-gravity technology that Tyhry developed.”

“Yes, I've tried to make it as easy as possible for the Ash to reach Yrmya.” Marda waved a hand dismissively. "But I need to tell you about the problems we have encountered, how they are connected, and how to avoid them."

She asked Eddy if she could use the Reality Viewer and she moved beside him at the workstation and used the Sedruth search interface. Marda telepathically commanded: Show me the grandchildren of Surty.

The Sedruth entity brought to the display a group of children who were at work in a grove of fruit trees, working quickly to complete their chore so they could get back to playing. In the background, the lake was silver in the early light.

"Look at those children," Marda said. "Tell me what you see."

Image generated by Gemini.

Zeta leaned forward. "They look happy... singing while they work."

"They are happy. Also notice what they're not doing." Marda let the footage run. The children finished the fruit harvesting and moved into a nearby park area, moving as an unhurried, chaotic group. They sat together in the park. A few of them appeared to be sharing something — not an object, something invisible. One child began humming and then another joined the same melody without the first child changing expression or making any gesture of instruction. "They share states of being as readily as they share food," Marda said. "Because they have had their G-sims since birth, they have grown up inside the telepathic community as naturally as they have grown up inside the air. The community's mind is their real world. Before a child on Asha has ever encountered uncertainty — before they have ever lain awake wondering what tomorrow will bring — they already have access to information about the future from the Sedron Time Stream which provides them with the quiet knowledge that the people they love will always be there."

"That sounds like a paradise," Zeta said.

"They view their pleasant lives as a gift. I don't want to understate that. But..." Marda took her eyes off of the display screen and turned in her chair to face Zeta. "But here is what that gift costs. You must understand what did not happen on Asha." She held up one finger. "Learning. There is a continual lack of interest in schooling and education. Only a few of the Ash care to learn about technology and tools above the level of a hoe." A second finger. "Growth. I expected there to be a population explosion. No. The human telepaths have a low reproductive rate. Not because of health problems. Because the telepathically linked community of Asha, with its access to the Sedron Time Stream, removed the desire to have children. They know the families they will eventually have, because the Sedron Time Stream provides glimpses of the future. A sense of comfortable foreknowledge is enough to delay the women having children.” Marda paused. “And going along with the lack of interest in having children is a general lack of ambition. I performed an experiment and tried to push the Ash towards having a great adventure."

Image generated by Gemini.

"The Yrmya experiment," Tyhry said. She had watched the slow progress on spaceship construction via the Viewing equipment on Final Reality Asha and now Tyhry could telepathically feel the sorrow that Marda felt over her failed technology experiment. Sedruth again showed images on the display screen of the partially complete anti-gravity pod.

Marda told the story with brutal clarity and brevity for Eddy and Zeta's benefit. "As a test and measure of the sense of adventure among the Ash, I challenged them to build a spacecraft that could reach the nearby planet Yrmya. Only a few of the Ash have ever joined the project and most of those, like Tarynon, only spend a small fraction of their time on the project. It took decades for them to design a vehicle capable of reaching Yrmya and they are still building it." Marda's voice was level and careful. "Their spacecraft will get built. Eventually. The broader community is proud of the on-going effort in exactly the way that the residents of a city on Earth might be proud of a local resident who climbed Mt. Everest: warmly, admiringly, and with no personal desire to duplicate the feat."

Pepper the cat jumped into Eddy's lap, walked across the back of Eddy's chair and then settled against the wall on the desk, behind Eddy's big old desktop computer. Tyhry was following Marda's thoughts telepathically and now she tried to summarize the first of their mistakes. Tyhry said, "By giving the Ash G-sims at birth, we created conditions for a comfortable community of telepaths. Telepaths who enjoy their comfort and never seek out the new and the challenging. But there is one more big problem that we created when we set up the new society on Asha."

"The tryp'At children," Marda said. "Like my daughter Surty. She grew up among human children and she loved them and they loved her. That was wonderful and I don't regret it." A pause. "But Surty had dream visions of the future, as tryp'At do, and because she was immersed in a telepathic community, those future visions were shared telepathically. The shape of things to come and that knowledge spread through the entire community. The children of Asha were already inclined toward contentment. Having a tryp'At child among them who carried genuine foreknowledge made the future feel not like territory to be explored but like a room they had already visited."

Zeta asked, quietly, "How is Surty?"

The Sedruth entity shifted the View of the Asha Simulation that was on the display screen. The images now showed Aymy's home, a well-built structure at the edge of the manufacturing settlement that Tyna and Aymy had established in the western mountains. Surty was visible in a courtyard, sitting with several of her children, in the middle of a music making session.

"She is perfectly happy," Marda said, and meant it. "She has been adopted by Tyna and Aymy and they play a major role in making components for the spaceship that is being built. Because I was born on Earth, I had expected that my young child, Surty, would need me nearby. She did not need me nearby. She was part of all the families." Marda let the images run on the screen for a few seconds longer and then she asked Sedruth to terminate the flow of data from the Simulation. "The lesson about tryp'At children, in the end, was not about my daughter. It was about the structural problem of mixing children with different levels of temporal foreknowledge inside a single telepathic community. By having tryp'At living among the humans, there was too clear an understanding of the future among the human telepaths."

T1 ask, "Will people like Surty ever leave the Simulation?"

"I've invited Surty to visit Earth, but she is not interested." Marda looked at T1 with the expression of someone who had been carrying a thought for some time and was glad to finally share it. "My sense is that she belongs to Asha in a way that is genuine and deep. She has told me she will visit Earth someday; she has seen that in a vision of the future. I believe her. But it might be when she is a thousand years old."

The room was quiet for a moment. Then Tyhry said, "Tell them the solution." Tyhry and Marda could telepathically sense that they were in agreement on a new approach for the Asha of the Final Reality.

Marda nodded. "Tyhry and I have admitted our errors. There is no need to rush human newborns into using technology-assisted telepathy. It is a mistake to embed tryp'At among the human telepaths." She turned to Eddy. "You know the term adrenarche?"

Image by ImageFX.

Eddy, who had an advanced biology degree, nodded slowly. "There is an increase in adrenal androgen production when human children are around age six to eight. A distinctive human developmental step before puberty. It is associated with rapid development of several parts of the brain and the emergence of more complex social reasoning."

"Yes. And with something else that is harder to measure but quite consistent across human development: the existence of a genuine adult relationship with the unknown. Parts of the human brain have rapid synaptic wiring during adrenarche and children can begin to accurately predict what is coming. They start to wonder about imaginary possibilities. They develop the productive anxiety of genuinely not knowing who they will become." Marda looked around the room. "On the Asha here in the Final Reality, no child will receive a G-sim before the age of eight. By age eight, a child has already had years of wondering. They have already formed a productive relationship with uncertainty. At that point, the G-sim will allow the development of telepathic linkages to others, but the human spirit of adventure seeking will already have been established. The development of telepathy will not interfere with normal human cognition."

Eddy said, slowly, "A child who grows up wondering and then gains telepathy at eight will become a different kind of telepath than a child who never had the experience of wondering about their future."

"Exactly. To correctly make a society of human telepaths, the wondering must become part of who they are and ignite an appreciation for adventure and discovery. Then telepathy will amplify their connections to the people they love without replacing their relationship to the unknown." Marda paused. "I believe the children of Final Reality Asha will grow up to want to explore Yrmya without any external arm twisting. With just these two changes to the initial conditions, I believe the telepathic human society that develops here in the Final Reality can be quite different than for our first experiment."

Zeta asked, "And the tryp'At children?"

"There will be no tryp'At children on Final Reality Asha," Tyhry said. "After HySe departs, no aliens will remain on Asha except Ely, who is a Grendel and is very practiced at keeping her thoughts opaque to those around her. The human children of Final Reality Asha will grow up without access to the specific kind of foreknowledge that tryp'At children carry naturally." Tyhry looked at Marda. "We think these two changes — the age of G-sim implantation, and the absence of tryp'At children — will be sufficient to result in the development of a society of happy telepathic humans who retain initiative and a sense of adventure."

Eddy was quiet for a time, thinking about the errors his daughter had made and the process by which she had recognized her mistakes. He turned in his chair and looked at Tyhry with admiration. "It was a bold experiment," he said. “I'm glad you were able to quickly identify your mistakes before any children were born on Asha here in the Final Reality.”

"The simulation of Asha is a remarkable place." Marda suggested, “I suppose it will provide Manny with a source of useful human telepaths. She'll have no hesitation in making use of them as her agents on Earth, secretly laying a foundation for the future time when Earthlings spread out into the galaxy and meet the telepaths of Asha.”

Image generated by Gemini.

Tyhry added, “Manny seems to have a formula for the correct amount of Asterothrope-derived gene patterns to maintain in the human population.”

Anthony arrived from the kitchen and announced that dinner was ready. The conversation shifted, becoming warmer and more scattered. T1 carried the grilled fish from the patio to the dining table. Zeta refilled cups. Marda found herself laughing at something Eddy said about a story from the Writers Block that included a confused account of the biology of the tryp'At. But Marda could not entirely relax. She was on a mission to make sure that conditions on Asha of the Final Reality were correctly established. She ate quickly and then insisted that she and Tyhry depart from Casanay and teleport to Asha.

---

Scene 2: Manny's Robots

Image generated by Gemini.

Marda and Tyhry arrived on Final Reality Asha when it was the early afternoon at the laboratory. Now with the Asha teleportation array installed, they teleporting onto the same stretch of beach where Tyhry had first swum ashore a month before. Marda took stock of her surroundings, noting that this island was warm and thick with the smell of flowering trees and the sound of something that might have been a large bird, somewhere in the canopy.

The nanotechnology laboratory sat perched above the beach where Manny had placed it, seemingly already grown into the vegetation. Marda marveled at Manny's ability to arrange for events decades in advance. Manny knew the future, while Marda had to discover it.

Manny. Image generated by Gemini.

Marda immediately felt the telepathic mind pattern of Ary. The Ary had established themselves on the island with the specific organized energy of people who had spent their lives preparing for the task of installing the teleportation array and bringing a group of humans to Asha. On the far side of the laboratory building were gardens and orchards where the Ary were at work with the three humans. And someone else.

Manny was waiting for Marda and Tyhry on the bench outside the laboratory's front entrance. She was wearing her preferred form for visits with Tyhry; her extraordinary artificial hair dancing in the light breeze. She stood when she saw Tyhry approaching.

Tyhry thought she saw something in Manny's expression: the confidence of someone who has worked toward a specific outcome for a very long time and is now watching it arrive.

Ely. Image generated by Gemini.

"Tyhry," Manny said. They fell into each-others arms.

"Manny." Tyhry let Manny's arms fold around her. After a moment Tyhry said, into Manny's shoulder, "You have been watching."

"Every moment," Manny said, re-stating the obvious. "After working on this project for a million years, what else would I be doing?"

They separated. Manny turned and embraced Marda, who had waited at a polite distance with the equanimity of someone who had long since made her peace with the fact that Manny's relationship with Tyhry occupied its own separate category. "I'm glad you could pull yourself away from the Simulation," Manny said. "You brought the latest version of your G-sim, Marda?"

Marda gave a slight nod. “I brought it for Ely. Where is she?”

Image generated by Gemini.

Ely the Grendel emerged from around the corner of the laboratory. After the passage of so much subjective time, Marda thought she seemed slightly taller than before, with the lean look that surprised Marda. Ely raised a hand in greeting to Marda and Tyhry. Marda opened her telepathic mind to Ely and they touched hands. The programmable femtobots that constituted a G-sim moved from Marda's body to Ely. Ely said, “Thank you.”

"Elly and Ary have been training the new gift I brought to Asha," Manny said.

Manny took one of Tyhry's hands and one of Marda's and led them through the laboratory and on out the back door. She led them into a garden where the Ary were teaching a group of robots how to operate the drip irrigation system. There were twelve humanoid robots, each with its own unique form. Their faces were quite natural looking and entirely without the uncanny-valley quality that could unsettle people. These were clearly and straightforwardly artificial constructs, their surfaces made of materials that caught the orange Asha sunlight and turned it into something warm and slightly amber, like old bronze. They were, unmistakably, tools. Extraordinarily well made tools, without pretense of being anything else.

Image generated by Gemini.

"Positronic robots," Manny said, "of the type that first appeared in the First Reality. Adapted, as I have adapted many things, for the specific needs of this world." She walked to the nearest one and placed her hand briefly against its chest. "They will assist the colonists with construction, agriculture, and any task that a willing and very capable machine can usefully perform. They are not designed to form telepathic links to people. They will help a society of telepathic humans get established. They will be helpful and unobtrusive."

Tyhry watched the robots learning from the Ary clones. Then she looked at Manny. "You planned this from the beginning."

"I had to wait for you and Marda to catch on, but I had these robots ready and waiting," Manny said, gently. "That is what I do; working on scales of time that humans find difficult to imagine and you artificial life-forms will eventually come to appreciate."

"You want Ely to remain here as an Observer." Tyhry looked at Ely. "As your agent, in the role she has had on Earth for half a million years."

Ely acknowledged this with a small shrug that contained something that was almost amusement. "Someone has to watch. Watching things is what I do. At least this world has gentler weather than Arizona. Call this my retirement world."

"And with the robots here," Tyhry said, working through it as she spoke, "the colony has what it needs without requiring tryp'At to remain as helpers. Which means—"

"Which means you are free to get back to exploring the galaxy without worrying about Asha," Manny said. "The Ary have installed the teleportation equipment that will allow easy travel between here and Earth. And here is my last gift to you, Tyhry. There are six star systems, almost on a direct line between here and Earth where there are Earth-like planets. Think of it as constituting a race. Who will colonize those worlds first? The people of Earth or the people of Asha?"

Image generated by Gemini.

“I look forward to discovering those worlds. I wonder how long it will be before the telepaths of this world are building spaceships.” Tyhry pushed the fingers of one hand into Manny's hair. "You could have had Ely show me the robots."

"I could have," Manny agreed.

"But you came here and did it yourself."

"I came myself." Manny reached out and touched Tyhry's face briefly, the gesture of someone who is allowing themselves one small indulgence before returning to the vast impersonal business of managing the development of sapient life across billions of years. "You have done everything I hoped you would do, my dear. You and Marda both. The Asha Simulation gave you exactly the education I needed you to have, and you drew the right conclusions from it, and you did not need me to tell you what those conclusions were." She let her hand drop. "The people of this world are going to have a normal human spirit of adventure. They will spread out into space faster than you might expect, building on a foundation of telepathic cooperation."

She took one step back. Then another. Her zeptite components were already beginning their transition, the light around her becoming briefly and characteristically complicated.

"Manny," Tyhry said.

Manny paused in her disappearing.

"Thank you," Tyhry said. "For all of it."

Manny was gone between one breath and the next, the way she always was, without ceremony and without warning, leaving behind only the warm Asha afternoon and the sound of the Ary working with the twelve robots.

---

Scene 3: Departures

Image generated by Gemini.

The day before HySe was scheduled to depart, Marda teleported to Earth and slipped into the Asha Simulation.

She used one of the antigrav cycles and rode to Tyna and Aymy's home in the western mountains. It was late afternoon when Marda coasted into the in the courtyard. Twenty-three years of Simulation time had passed since Marda had exited through the femtotube. Two decades had elapsed among the community of telepaths she had helped found, moving forward without her.

Surty was in the courtyard, loading manufactured good into the delivery truck. She felt Marda's telepathic mind pattern looked up when Marda arrived. She was not surprised. She had been alterted to Marda's approach through the community's telepathic network. Marda got off the flyer and they embraced.

"You took longer than you said," Surty told her.

"I know," Marda said. "I am sorry for that."

Surty looked at her mother and tried to scan through Marda's thoughts and memories. "Everything is all right on the other Asha?"

"Everything is well. I learned a great deal from watching this world. Things about human telepaths that will be helpful on the other Asha."

Surty nodded slowly, processing this with the particular equanimity of someone whose relationship to time had always been, at its root, mediated by a community of telepaths with access to information from the Sedron Time Stream. "You won't be staying long."

"No," Marda said. "I have a galaxy to help explore. And Sedrover is waiting." She paused. "We'll explore in the direction of Asha and HySe will work its way through the galaxy towards us, exploring towards Earth from the direction of Asha."

Image generated by Gemini.

"I am very happy here," Surty said, with the directness that had always been characteristic of her. "Aymy and Tyna have been teaching me things about hierion physics. I suppose I almost understand how we will reach Yrmya." She looked at Marda with some embarrassment. "I suppose you find our struggle to achieve interplanetary travel quite boring."

"I understand the challenges that you face, that space travel is not a high priority for the Ash."

Surty hugged Marda once more. "I will come and visit Earth one day." She smiled at Marda, and the smile was warm and entirely without distress. "But not yet."

Marda held her daughter for a long time then she activated her recall function and returned to the Ekcolir Reality. She was greeted by T2 and the Anthony replicoid and told that Sedrover was ready to depart from Earth.

---

Tyhry found Ely the next morning on the beach, waiting for the Ary to return from a quick visit home to Tiz. Tyhry had spent a month learning to dive deep into the Ary mind pattern, falling deeply in love with them and she was eager to be with them, inside HySe, traveling through the vastness of space.

"How long do you plan to stay here?" Tyhry asked Ely.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

Ely gazed at the ocean. "Until the telepathic humans develop an interstellar civilization... which means quite a while." She glanced sideways at Tyhry. "After having been on Earth for half a million years, this will seem like a brief retirement vacation."

"You'll report to Manny."

"I'll continue to report to Manny. And to you, whenever you drop in for a visit." Ely paused. "I believe in this world. I want you to know that. The children who grow up here without a G-sim until they are eight years old — they will be curious. These children will want to explore Yrmya without being told to do it."

The Ary arrived back on Asha by long-range teleportation from Tiz. The Ary telepathically told Tyhry: We'll see you on HySe. They teleported up to the spaceship.

Tyhry was still telepathically connected to Ary. "They are ready to go."

Ely said, "Get out of here, Tyhry. Go find those new worlds that Manny dangled in front of you." It was said with the specific affection of someone who has spent a long time learning to appreciate the thing they are letting go. "This world does not need you anymore. I hope you never get jaded knowing that and always feel proud of how you gave human telepathy its beginning in this Reality."

Image generated by Gemini.

The short-range HySe teleportation equipment activated and a moment later Tyhry was standing inside HySe. The Ary were for departure. She could feel all eight of their minds, distributed and interconnected, a warm and complex architecture that was like a piece of music in a language she was only beginning to understand. As she settled into the pilot's station, one of the Ary — she had learned to distinguish them now, a small but hard-won skill — came and sat beside her and placed a hand briefly against Tyhry's own.

A flash of something: not language exactly, but the shape of language. Eight minds agreeing, simultaneously, that they were ready to begin a new adventure.

Tyhry brought the navigation system online. The six way-points Manny had mentioned were out there waiting. Tyhry did not know exactly where they were, but she felt a taste of challenge and competition with Marda to discover them. She wondered if any of the six worlds had existed in past Realities and might already be on star charts. Tyhry had no future vision of those six worlds and she imagined that Sedruth had been careful to block all information about them from flowing to Tyhry via the Sedron Time Stream. Manny had carefully designed this planet search as entertainment for Marda and Tyhry.

"Asha calling HySe." The voice of Naseh came through the communications system, "HySe, this is Naseh. One bit of news before your departure. I'm pregnant."

Alexina replied, "Have fun being a mom. No promises on when we'll get back here, but nine months seems like a reasonable target for our return."

Image generated by Gemini.

Tyhry brought the sedron-powered interstellar drive online. The familiar vibrations of the ship preparing to skip across the boundary between the Hadron Domain and the Sedron Domain moved through HySe from stem to stern. Outside the view-port, the orange sun of Asha hung in the deep black of space, and Asha itself was visible below.

Tyhry imagined nine years from now when Lori's first child and Naseh's first born would start forming a telepathic connection and they would look up at the night sky and see a point of amber light called Yrmya and wonder what was on that world. Those children did not yet exist, the wondering had not yet begun, but the conditions for it were in place, arranged by Manny.

Tyhry engaged the drive.

HySe departed Asha on a heading toward Earth, in search of the unknown exoplanets that Manny had revealed. Tyhry and the eight tryp'At clones quickly went to Tyhry's cabin in search of the boundaries of their telepathic connection and with the hope that their shared telepathic explorations would be as boundless as the galaxy.

End of Plūribus ē Spatium

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Images by WOMBO Dream. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers

The Right Question

Tyhry and the Ary clones onboard HySe. Image by Leonardo.

 Shown in my previous blog post is a planning session with Claude concerning what to include in Chapter 6 of the science fictions story "Plūribus ē Spatium". Below on this page is Claude's 5,200 word-long first draft of Chapter 6 of "Plūribus ē Spatium".  

Image by WOMBO Dream

 Tea Time. Claude has been on a mission to include tea drinking in every chapter of "Plūribus ē Spatium". Maybe this is what happens whenever Claude is not allowed to insert into the story a new character named Chen. I had ImageFX, Gemini and Leonardo make some images depicting tea drinkers. It was not easy to get AI-generated images of people holding two tea cups at the same time. 

Image by WOMBO Dream

I had to get Claude to help devise a text prompt that would force ImageFX to comply with my request that people hold a tea cup in each hand; "Each woman holds exactly two fine porcelain teacups simultaneously, one teacup gripped in her left hand and a second teacup gripped in her right hand, both cups raised and held at once, every woman has a cup in each hand, two cups per woman, one cup per hand. On the table between them sits an impossibly elaborate fractal science-fictional tea brewing apparatus of brass and glowing blue crystal, towering and ornate. Each figure: left hand holding teacup, right hand holding teacup, two cups held simultaneously." When I asked Gemini to make an alien with four arms and a tea cup in all 4 hands, Gemini made five arms and one hand without a tea cup (see Figure 1, below). 

Chapter 6 – The Right Question

Scene 1: What the Simulation Taught

Marda arrived back in the Final Reality the way she usually did — suddenly, without ceremony, stepping out of the shimmer of a recall transition and into the familiar hallway of Casanay as though she had simply walked through a door. The difference was that the door she had stepped through had been eighty-four years wide.

Tyhry at Casanay. Image by Leonardo.

Tyhry was in the great room, standing at the window with a cup of tea going cold in her hand, watching the late afternoon light working its way across the desert. She had been home for two days, waiting. She turned when she heard Marda in the hallway.

Marda looked exactly as she always did, which was one of the stranger things about being a femtobot replicoid. Eighty-four years of simulated time had passed in the Asha Simulation and Marda had lived every one of them, and yet she stood in the hallway of Casanay looking precisely as she had when she left. She was carrying something small in her closed right hand.

"You look tired," Tyhry said.

Marda considered this. "I'm not tired. I don't think I'm tired. I think I might be something that doesn't have a good word yet." She opened her hand. In her palm was the femtotube anchor, warm and faintly sparkling. She set it on the table beside the door. "Where is everyone?"

"Eddy is at his desk. Zeta is reading. Anthony is making dinner and pretending he is not listening to everything we say." Tyhry called towards the kitchen. "Anthony, please tell Zeta that Marda is here."

From the kitchen came the sound of a quiet acknowledgment and then the efficient sound of dinner preparations continuing without interruption. Anthony had heard everything.

Zeta arrived from the hallway that led to the bedroom wing, moving quickly. She embraced Marda with the warmth of someone who understood, without needing to be told, that the person she was hugging had been away for a very long time in some meaningful sense. "Come and sit down," Zeta said. "You need tea."

Eddy turned in his swivel chair when Marda entered the great room. He had the expression he wore when he was genuinely uncertain whether to close his laptop or keep one hand on it. He decided on genuine hospitality and closed the laptop. "Marda. Tyhry told us you were coming."

T1 appeared from the direction of Tyhry's bedroom suite where she had been working on modifications to Tyhry's flying car schematics. She stopped in the doorway when she saw Marda and the room adjusted to her quiet presence. She was using Tyhry's conventional Earth human body form and her expression contained the specific quality of eager, slightly suppressed curiosity that had always distinguished T1 from the original Tyhry.

Anthony brought tea for everyone and settled himself into a chair near the kitchen doorway. He had never pretended not to be interested in these conversations.

"Tell us," Tyhry said, when they were all settled.

Marda wrapped both hands around her cup and looked at the fire that Anthony had set in the fireplace. She organized her thoughts the way a scientist organizes data: not by emotion but by sequence, what happened first and what it revealed.

"I should start with what went well," Marda said. "Because most of it went well. The colony is healthy and genuinely happy. The telepathic bonds between the humans developed along exactly the trajectory that Manny predicted. By Year Eight the children were forming reliable synapex linkages to both parents and to each other. By Year Twenty, the shared mind-space of the village had developed a richness and complexity that was extraordinary to observe. The art alone—" she paused. "Eddy, I wish you could have seen the art. Music, textiles, painting. Every surface of every building. They created an aesthetic vocabulary that belonged entirely to them, something that had never existed anywhere before."

Eddy looked genuinely pleased by this. He asked, "The humans were content?"

"More than content. I chose that word carefully. Content is not a small thing. Most humans in history have never achieved it." Marda set down her cup. "But I need to tell you about the two problems, because they are connected, and because understanding the connection is the reason I'm here."

She asked Eddy if she could use the Reality Viewer and he got up from his chair and gestured toward it without hesitation. Marda sat at the familiar workstation and found the archive of the Asha Simulation through Sedruth's search interface. She pulled up footage and the display screen filled with an image of the settlement that had been called Ashapor by its founders and simply "home" by everyone born there.

It was a warm morning in the image. Gardens ran between low wide buildings. Children were visible among the bean rows, working quickly so they could get back to playing. The lake was silver in the early light.

"Look at those children," Marda said. "Tell me what you see."

Zeta leaned forward. "They look happy."

"They are happy. Now look at what they're not doing." Marda let the footage run. The children finished their harvesting and moved into a loose, unhurried group. They sat together in the garden. A few of them appeared to be sharing something — not an object, something invisible. One child began humming and then another joined the same melody without the first child changing expression or making any gesture of instruction. "They share states of being as readily as they share food," Marda said. "Because they have had their G-sims since birth, they have grown up inside the telepathic community as naturally as they have grown up inside the air. The community's mind is their first experience of the world. Before a child on Asha has ever encountered uncertainty — before they have ever lain awake wondering what tomorrow will bring — they already have access to the warmth of the Sedron Time Stream, the quiet knowledge that the people they love will still be there."

"That sounds like a gift," Zeta said.

Image by Leonardo.

"It is a gift. I don't want to understate this." Marda closed the footage and turned in the chair to face the room. "But here is what that gift costs. I watched the settlement for eighty-four years and I need to tell you what did not happen in those eighty-four years." She held up one finger. "No significant expansion of the settlement. More buildings, more gardens, yes. But in eighty-four years, the people of Asha spread perhaps five kilometers from where Sedrover first landed. The motivation to venture further was never urgent, because the urgent need was always to be near the people you loved, and the people you loved were here." A second finger. "Dramatically reduced reproductive rate. Not because of health problems. Because the telepathically linked community of Asha, with its access to the Sedron Time Stream, felt complete in a way that removed the particular anxiety — the unresolved questions about the future — that prompts people to want children. They knew the families they would eventually have, in the vague way that the Sedron Time Stream whispers rather than announces. That sense of comfortable foreknowledge was enough to satisfy the impulse."

"And Yrmya?" Tyhry asked. She had seen much of this already through the Viewing equipment on Final Reality Asha, but she wanted Marda to tell it in her own words for Eddy and Zeta's benefit.

"In eighty-four years, the Yrmya Circle built a spacecraft. Seven engineers, working in a workshop beside the school. They designed a vehicle capable of reaching Yrmya and they were on the verge of building it when I left." Marda's voice was level and careful. "Seven people, out of a community of several hundred, who wanted to find out what was on the next world over. And the broader community was proud of them in exactly the way that a city is proud of its eccentric marathon runner: warmly, admiringly, and with no personal desire to participate."

Figure 1.  Gemini modified a
Leonardo-generated image to insert the alien.

The fire crackled. Pepper the cat walked across the back of Eddy's chair and settled against the wall.

Eddy said, "You said there were two problems. The G-sims at birth are the first. What is the second?"

"The tryp'At children," Marda said. "My daughter Surty." She found she could say it directly, which surprised her a little. "Surty was born on the Asha Simulation. She is tryp'At and she grew up among the human children and she loved them and they loved her. That was real and I don't regret it." A pause. "But Surty had dream visions of the future, as tryp'At do, and because she was immersed in a telepathic community, those visions shared themselves. Not deliberately, not irresponsibly. Simply because that is how information moves through a community of telepaths. Surty knew the shape of things to come and that knowledge spread through the children's network the way warmth spreads through a room. The children of Asha were already inclined toward contentment. Having a tryp'At child among them who carried genuine foreknowledge made the future feel not like territory to be explored but like a room they had already visited."

Zeta asked, quietly, "How is Surty?"

Marda found the Viewer again and pulled up the current state of the Asha Simulation. The image showed Aymy's home, a well-built structure at the edge of the manufacturing settlement that Tyna and Aymy had established in the western mountains. Surty was visible in a courtyard, sitting with several human children, apparently in the middle of telling a story that required her to use her hands extensively. The children were transfixed.

"She is perfectly happy," Marda said, and meant it. "She has been adopted by Tyna and Aymy, who are very capable of raising a tryp'At child. I had expected— " she stopped, and adjusted what she had been about to say. "I had expected that Surty would need me nearby. She does not need me nearby. She has what she needs." Marda let the image run for a few seconds longer and then closed it. "The lesson about tryp'At children, in the end, was not about my daughter. It was about the structural problem of mixing children with different levels of temporal foreknowledge inside a single telepathic community."

T1 spoke for the first time, quietly from the doorway. "Will Surty ever leave the Simulation?"

"The femtotube is open. She can use it whenever she chooses. I've told her this." Marda looked at T1 with the expression of someone who had been carrying a thought for some time and was glad to finally set it down. "My sense is that she will not leave for a very long time. She belongs to that world in a way that is genuine and deep. She has told me she will visit Earth someday. I believe her."

The room was quiet for a moment. Then Tyhry said, "Tell them the solution."

Marda nodded. "Tyhry and I have discussed this. She had already reached many of the same conclusions by Viewing the Simulation from Final Reality Asha." She turned to Eddy. "You know the term adrenarche?"

Eddy, who had spent decades reading widely in pursuit of the stories he wrote, nodded slowly. "The beginning of adrenal androgen production. Around age six to eight. The developmental step before puberty. It is associated with the emergence of more complex social reasoning."

"Yes. And with something else that is harder to measure but quite consistent across human development: the beginning of a genuine relationship with the unknown. Before adrenarche, a child's relationship to the future is almost entirely mediated by the adults around them. After adrenarche, children begin to form their own questions about what is coming. They start to wonder. They develop the productive anxiety of genuinely not knowing who they will become." Marda looked around the room. "On Final Reality Asha, no child will receive a G-sim before the age of eight. By age eight, a child has already had years of wondering. They have already formed a relationship with uncertainty. The G-sim enhances the connections they already have — it does not replace the developmental experience of not yet being connected."

Eddy said, slowly, "A child who grows up wondering and then gains telepathy at eight becomes a different kind of telepath than a child who never had the experience of wondering."

"Exactly. The wondering becomes part of who they are. The telepathy amplifies their connections to the people they love without replacing their relationship to the unknown." Marda paused. "We believe the children of Final Reality Asha will grow up to want to explore Yrmya. We cannot be certain. But we believe it."

Zeta asked, "And the tryp'At children?"

"There will be no tryp'At children on Final Reality Asha," Tyhry said. "The Ary are adults. They will not be having children on Asha. When HySe departs, no tryp'At will remain except Ely, who is a Grendel and is very practiced at keeping her thoughts opaque to those around her. The human children of Final Reality Asha will grow up without access to the specific kind of foreknowledge that tryp'At children carry naturally." Tyhry looked at Marda. "We think these two changes — the age of G-sim implantation, and the absence of tryp'At children — will be sufficient."

"You think," Eddy said. Not skeptically. Just precisely.

Image by Leonardo.

"We think," Tyhry agreed, with the same precision. "That is all we can say. Manny has not told us what she expects. The Final Reality Asha will develop along its own path and we will observe and learn. But we believe the right conditions are now in place."

Eddy was quiet for a long moment. He turned in his chair and looked at the star map that occupied one quadrant of his display screen. He had spent decades writing about the Secret History of Humanity and the long, patient work of the bumpha and the pek to bring humans safely through the extinction thresholds. It was the work of billions of years, telescoping down to this: a settlement of a few dozen people on a warm planet 800 light-years away, learning how to be telepathic without losing the desire to cross the next ocean.

"It is a remarkable experiment," he said finally.

"It is a remarkable universe," Marda replied.

Anthony arrived from the kitchen and announced that dinner was ready. The conversation shifted, becoming warmer and more scattered, the specific relief of people who have spent a long time thinking hard about difficult things and can now, for an hour, simply eat together. T1 carried dishes from the kitchen to the dining table with the helpful efficiency she had developed over years of living at Casanay. Zeta refilled cups. Marda found herself laughing at something Eddy said about a story from the Writers Block that had gotten the biology of a G-sim entirely backwards, and was surprised, briefly, that she could laugh that easily. Eighty-four years was a long time to carry, and Casanay was a good place to set it down.

---

Scene 2: Manny's Robots

Marda and Tyhry arrived on Final Reality Asha in the early afternoon, teleporting onto the same stretch of beach where Tyhry had first swum ashore a month before. The island was warm and thick with the smell of flowering trees and the sound of something that might have been a large bird, somewhere in the canopy.

The nanotechnology laboratory sat where Manny had placed it, seemingly already grown into the vegetation, the kind of permanence that only Manny could arrange in a month. The Ary had established themselves on the island with the specific organized energy of people who had spent years preparing for a task and were now simply doing it. From the far side of the laboratory building came the intermittent sound of construction and the clean harmonic tone of hierion-based fabrication equipment.

Manny was waiting for them on the bench outside the laboratory's front entrance. She was wearing her preferred form for Earth visits, her extraordinary hair in full effect, and she was holding something that might have been a flower or might have been a piece of hierion fabrication equipment, and she was examining it with the expression of someone who found everything they looked at interesting.

She stood when she saw Tyhry.

There was a moment — just a moment — when Tyhry saw something in Manny's expression that she did not often see there. Pride was not quite the right word for it. It was something older and more complicated: the particular emotion of someone who has worked toward a specific outcome for a very long time and is now watching it arrive.

"Tyhry," Manny said.

"Manny." Tyhry crossed the distance between them and let Manny's arms fold around her. Manny was warm in the way that zeptite-based entities were sometimes warm, a warmth that seemed to come from inside the light rather than from the surface. After a moment Tyhry said, into Manny's shoulder, "You have been watching."

"Every moment," Manny said, without any trace of apology. "I always watch."

They separated. Manny turned and embraced Marda, who had waited at a polite distance with the equanimity of someone who had long since made her peace with the fact that Manny's relationship with Tyhry occupied its own separate category. "Eighty-four years," Manny said. "You are extraordinary, Marda. The research logs you kept are going to matter for a very long time."

Marda accepted this with a slight nod.

Ely the Grendel emerged from around the corner of the laboratory. She was wearing a form that Tyhry had not seen before — slightly taller than usual, with the lean unhurried look of someone who had recently decided they were going to be staying somewhere for a while. She raised a hand in greeting to Marda and Tyhry.

"Come and see what I've brought you," Manny said.

She led them around the far side of the laboratory to a wide clearing that the Ary had apparently prepared. Standing in the clearing, arranged in a loose group with the patient stillness of objects waiting to be activated, were twelve robots. They were humanoid in structure — bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical, with articulated hands — but entirely without the uncanny-valley quality that had always made Earth's early attempts at humanoid robotics unsettle people. These were clearly and straightforwardly mechanical, their surfaces made of materials that caught the orange Asha sunlight and turned it into something warm and slightly amber, like old bronze. They were, unmistakably, tools. Extraordinarily well made tools, without pretense of being anything else.

"Positronic robots," Manny said, "of the type that first appeared in the First Reality. Adapted, as I have adapted many things, for the specific needs of this world." She walked to the nearest one and placed her hand briefly against its chest. "They will assist the colonists with construction, agriculture, and any task that a willing and very capable machine can usefully perform. They will not form telepathic bonds. They will not share dream visions. They will be helpful and they will be, in the specific sense that I intend, unobtrusive."

Tyhry looked at the robots for a long time. Then she looked at Manny. "You planned this from the beginning."

"I planned many things from the beginning," Manny said, gently. "That is the nature of working on scales of time that humans find difficult to imagine."

"You wanted Ely to remain here as an Observer." Tyhry looked at Ely. "As your agent, in the role she has had on Earth for half a million years."

Ely accepted this with a small shrug that contained something that was almost amusement. "Someone has to watch. Watching things is what I do. At least this world has better weather than Arizona."

"And with the robots here," Tyhry said, working through it as she spoke, "the colony has what it needs without requiring tryp'At to remain as helpers. Which means—"

"Which means you are free to go," Manny said. Her voice carried something that was not quite sadness and not quite release, but somewhere between the two, the specific emotion of someone who has been preparing for a farewell for a very long time and finds, when it arrives, that preparation was not quite adequate. "The Ary have installed the teleportation equipment on the north island. HySe is fueled. You have coordinates for six systems between here and Earth that I would like you to visit on your way back through this region of the galaxy. I have placed the waypoints in HySe's navigation system."

Tyhry looked at Manny. "You could have had Ely give me the robots."

"I could have," Manny agreed.

Image by Leonardo.

"But you came yourself."

"I came myself." Manny reached out and touched Tyhry's face briefly, the gesture of someone who is allowing themselves one small indulgence before returning to the vast impersonal business of managing the development of sapient life across billions of years. "You have done everything I hoped you would do, my dear. You and Marda both. The Asha Simulation gave you exactly the education I needed you to have, and you drew the right conclusions from it, and you did not need me to tell you what those conclusions were." She let her hand drop. "The people of this world are going to be remarkable. I have seen a long way into their future, and I am permitted to tell you this much: Tarynon's spaceship is going to reach Yrmya."

Tyhry felt something unlock in her chest. "When?"

"In the Simulation?"

"In the Final Reality."

Manny smiled, with the particular warmth of someone who has decided to offer a gift they had previously intended to withhold. "Here, in this Reality, where the children will not be given G-sims until they are eight years old and have already formed their own questions about the universe — faster than you might expect."

She took one step back. Then another. Her zeptite components were already beginning their transition, the light around her becoming briefly and characteristically complicated.

"Manny," Tyhry said.

Manny paused in her disappearing.

"Thank you," Tyhry said. "For all of it."

Manny was gone between one breath and the next, the way she always was, without ceremony and without warning, leaving behind only the warm Asha afternoon and the sound of the Ary working on the other side of the laboratory building and the twelve robots standing patient in the amber light, waiting to be useful.

---

Scene 3: Departures

The day before HySe was scheduled to depart, Marda walked alone to the far side of the island and sat on a rock above the water. The Asha ocean moved differently than Earth's, the tides ruled by a moon that was slightly farther away than Luna, and the result was a gentler rhythm, slower, more considered. She had grown fond of it during the month she had spent here before going through the femtotube.

She had an errand to run first. She activated her recall function and slipped into the Asha Simulation.

She arrived in the courtyard outside Tyna and Aymy's home in the western mountains. It was late afternoon in the Simulation and the light was going golden and the cooking smell from the kitchen was something that Marda identified, after a moment, as roasted root vegetables with herbs she did not recognize. Twenty-three years of Simulation time had passed since Marda had exited through the femtotube. Two decades of a world she had helped build, moving forward without her.

Surty was in the courtyard, repairing a piece of agricultural equipment with the focused efficiency of someone who found this kind of problem genuinely satisfying. She was now in her early thirties in apparent age. She had the particular competence that Asha seemed to produce, the specific capability of someone who had grown up knowing exactly what the people around her needed.

She looked up when Marda arrived. She was not surprised. She had felt Marda's approach through the community's telepathic network, the way everyone on Asha always felt a familiar mind pattern returning.

"You took longer than you said," Surty told her.

"I know," Marda said. "I am sorry for that."

Surty set down the agricultural equipment and looked at her mother with the clear-eyed directness that was one of the consistent qualities of the Asha-born. She was not angry. She was also not pretending that she hadn't noticed the absence. "Is everything all right on the other Asha?"

"Everything is well. We have learned a great deal from watching your world. Things that will help the other Asha."

Surty nodded slowly, processing this with the particular equanimity of someone whose relationship to time had always been, at its root, mediated by a community of telepaths with gentle access to the future. "You won't be staying long now either."

"No," Marda said. "I have a galaxy to help explore. And Sedrover is waiting." She paused. "You are happy here."

"I am very happy here," Surty said, with the directness that had always been characteristic of her. "Aymy is impossible to live with and I have found her completely indispensable. Tyna has been teaching me things about hierion physics that I suspect I will need at some point in the future, though I can't yet see clearly in what context. The children here are wonderful." She looked at Marda. "You built something remarkable in this world. I don't think you fully understand that yet."

"I understand that I had remarkable help."

Surty picked up the agricultural tool again, considered it, and set it down once more. "I will come and visit Earth one day. I've seen myself there." She smiled at Marda, and the smile was warm and entirely without distress. "But not yet."

Marda held her daughter for a long moment, the specific embrace of a parent reconciling the child they expected with the person who actually arrived. Then she stepped back and activated her recall function and returned to the Final Reality.

She sat on her rock above the Asha ocean for a while and let the slow tidal rhythm of the water do its work. Then she stood up and went to find T2 and the Anthony replicoid and tell them that Sedrover was ready to fly.

---

Tyhry found Ely the next morning on the beach on the north side of the island, watching the Ary finish the last calibrations on the teleportation array. The eight clones worked with the synchronized precision of people who had never experienced an absence of coordination, their movements overlapping and completing each other's in the specific way that deep telepathic linkage made possible. Tyhry had spent a month learning to read the Ary mind pattern and she was only now beginning to understand how the eight individual perspectives assembled themselves into something that was more than the sum of its parts.

"How long do you plan to stay?" Tyhry asked Ely.

Image by Leonardo.

Ely considered the ocean. "Until the job is done. Which, given the pace at which biological humans develop large civilizations, means a while." She glanced sideways at Tyhry. "Your father thinks I've been on Earth for half a million years. He's not far wrong. I have a talent for the long watch."

"You'll report to Manny."

"I'll report to Manny. And to you, when you are in range." Ely paused. "I believe in this world. I want you to know that. For all my reservations about the Simulated Asha, I believe in this one. The children who grow up here without a G-sim until they are eight years old — they will be curious. I have spent half a million years watching humans and I know what curiosity looks like. These children will want to know what Yrmya is."

Tyhry watched two of the Ary carry a calibration instrument down to the water's edge and hold it level against the horizon. "Manny told me the spaceship reaches Yrmya."

Ely nodded. "She told me too. She could not resist."

"No," Tyhry agreed. "She never can."

Ely said, "Get out of here, Tyhry. Go find something new." It was said with the specific affection of someone who has spent a long time learning to appreciate the thing they are letting go. "This world does not need you anymore. That is the most useful thing you can accomplish for any world."

Tyhry activated the short-range teleportation equipment and sent a signal to Roxzel.

A moment later she was standing inside HySe.

---

The Ary had already secured themselves for departure before Tyhry reached the navigation station. She could feel all eight of their minds, distributed and interconnected, a warm and complex architecture that she was still learning to read, like a piece of music in a language she was only beginning to understand. As she settled into the pilot's station, one of the Ary — she had learned to distinguish them now, a small but hard-won skill — came and sat beside her and placed a hand briefly against Tyhry's own.

A flash of something: not language exactly, but the shape of language. Eight minds agreeing, simultaneously, that they were ready.

Tyhry brought the navigation system online. The six waypoints Manny had entered were there, plotted in a curve between Asha and Earth, six star systems that Manny had decided were worth a look. Tyhry did not know what was there. She did not know if any of them had habitable planets or interesting chemistry or ruins of past Realities or something entirely unexpected. She had no future vision of what she would find at any of those six points of light.

She realized, with something she recognized as satisfaction, that she was looking forward to not knowing.

"Asha calling HySe." The voice came through the communications system: Alexina from the crew station, conducting a final check with the colonists below.

Ely's voice came back on the channel: "HySe, this is Asha. You are cleared for departure. Try not to find anything too interesting without telling us about it."

Alexina said, "No promises."

Tyhry brought the sedron drive online. The familiar threshold sensation of a ship preparing to skip across the boundary between the Hadron Domain and the Sedron Domain moved through HySe from stem to stern. Outside the viewport, the orange sun of Asha hung in the deep black of space, and Asha itself was visible below — small, blue-green, wrapped in the slow swirl of cloud systems that had been building all morning over the ocean on the island's western side.

From inside the settlement, invisible at this distance, eight years from now a child would look up at the night sky and see a point of amber light called Yrmya and begin to wonder what was there. That child did not yet exist. The wondering had not yet begun. But the conditions for it were in place, arranged by a million years of patient work by a being composed of zeptites who had, by her own account, never entirely stopped being young.

Tyhry engaged the drive.

HySe departed Asha on a heading toward the first of the six unknown waypoints, carrying eight tryp'At clones and a crew who had learned to be comfortable with uncertainty, moving out into the portion of the galaxy that no one aboard had yet seen, in search of whatever was next.

End of Claude's first draft of Chapter 6 of Plūribus ē Spatium

Two AI-generated video clips are shown in the video, below.

Image by WOMBO Dream

From a video frame generated
by Google's Flow.

Google's Flow always goes out of its way to ruin a video. I wanted her to complain about not getting a straw and Flow kept giving her a straw. 

My text prompts specified "The spaceships in the sky slowly drift lazily and randomly." but Flow did not seem to want to make the spaceships move.

Next: my edited version of Chapter 6 of "Plūribus ē Spatium". 

Images by WOMBO Dream, ImageFX and Gemini. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers