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| Eddy, Manny and the Viewer. |
Reminder: Chapters 1 - 3 of "The Manikoid Intervention" are going to serve as Chapters 4 - 6 of "The RNA Seeds".
The RNA Seeds - Chapter 3: The Viewer (Chapter 1)(Chapter 2)
Aunt Beryl enjoyed visiting tourist destinations in and around Sedona, particularly the energy vortexes which she invariable claimed made her feel nauseous; a sure sign of her paranormal sensitivities, she avowed. After the cookout, Aunt Beryl, Anthony, Zeta, Tyhry and Marda drove to Sedona for a day-long trip, planning to return to Casanay late the next day. That left Eddy alone in Casanay, if one can be alone with a tribe of demanding cats.
Eddy had stood on the front steps and watched Zeta's SUV making its way down the long unpaved driveway. He turned and returned inside to his computer before the pale cloud of dust had dissolved into the air above the creosote. Eddy quickly settled into his chair at the workstation in the great room with the cats distributing themselves across the available surfaces, Eddy now the only entertainment in the house. Trib took the windowsill. Pepper took the arm of the sofa. Luna, after conducting a brief and apparently inconclusive inspection of the kitchen, returned and sat beside Eddy's chair with the expectant expression she wore when she had decided that the most interesting thing was likely to be whatever Eddy was about to do.
He wrote for several hours. This new story had been slow to start — it often was, in the days when a premise was assembling itself but had not yet found its architecture — but the morning was productive in the quiet, accumulative way that Eddy had long since learned to value over dramatic breakthroughs. He wrote and deleted and rewrote. He made notes in the margin document he kept alongside every active manuscript. He ate a sandwich at his desk rather than at the dining table, on the grounds that there was no one present to object, and he gave Luna a piece of turkey.
The afternoon faded into evening. He fed and watered the cats, but otherwise kept to his writing routine.
At nine-fifteen in the evening, the woman appeared beside his workstation.
Eddy did not hear her arrive. There was no sound — no door, no footstep. She was simply not there, and then she was, standing three feet to his left in the dim light of the great room, and Eddy's first response was not the response of a man confronting an impossible apparition. His first response was the response of a man whose brain, assisted by Manny's infites, had recognized the meaning of something before his conscious mind has caught up with it.
He knew her immediately. She was exactly as he remembered her: young, perhaps twenty-two, her unusually thin body an indication of the fact that she was a bumpha-designed construct, crafted for bumpha purposes. She was wearing the same jacket — the dark green one — that she had been wearing the last time he had seen her, in the parking lot near the biosciences library, the afternoon she had told him she was leaving and that he was going to be all right without her.
"Ivory," Eddy said.
The woman who he had known as Ivory Fersoni smiled, and it was exactly Ivory's smile, and the memories that had been suppressed for twenty-eight years arrived in Eddy all at once: the memory of what it had been like to be twenty-one and certain that he was in love. He's had no time for the memory of her absence to fester before it was hidden from his conscious mind. He understood now, all at once, in the way that a suppressed thing reveals its full shape when the hand pressing it down is finally lifted.
Then the memory of the suppression itself was also available to him, and he understood that too.
He sat back in his chair and let out a long breath. "You did this," he said. "You did all of it."
"Eddy." Her voice was exactly Ivory's voice. "I've been waiting for you to be ready to have this conversation."
"I was in love with you." He said it without any particular accusation. It was an observation, precise and accurate. "You were made to be exactly the kind of person I would fall in love with. And then, when you'd done what you needed to do, you left."
The woman who had played the role of Ivory in Eddy's life was quiet for a moment. It was not an uncomfortable silence — she wore it the way Ivory had always worn silences, without any anxiety about filling them.
"Yes," she said.
"And then you made sure I met Zeta." He considered this. "That was you as well."
"That was also me. You might even thank me sometime."
Eddy looked at the new/old woman — the entity — standing beside his workstation in the lamplight of the great room he had lived in for decades in the company of a woman he loved and a daughter he was proud of and an endless succession of cats. He thought about the life he had lived, and the stories he had written, and the particular sensation of sitting down at the keyboard in the early morning hours with the feeling that something was arriving through him rather than from him, some current from a source he had never been able to identify.
He said, "It is amazing that you know exactly how to control my behavior. And make me happy that you did."
She giggled. This was a different smile from Ivory's — something ancient and patient and, Eddy thought, genuinely amused, the way he could be amused when watching a cat play with a toy mouse. "I have had a great deal of practice, waiting for this day."
"I imagine you have." He pointed a finger at her. "You are Manny the bumpha."
"I am."
"So... you are real."
"I am real, yes."
Eddy found that this did not require the large emotional adjustment he would have expected. The bumpha were real; he had written about them for most of his adult life. The information he had included in his stories about the bumpha had always been accurate, he now understood, because it had always been provided to him by Manny. The feeling that accompanied this recognition was not shock. It was closer to the sensation of finally identifying a chord that had been playing just below the threshold of conscious hearing for as long as he could remember.
"My behavioral nanites," he said, "will prevent me from telling anyone that you are real."
"They will."
"And yet you're telling me anyway."
"I'm telling you now because I'm giving you a new tool to play with... something that will help you write new stories." Manny — who was still wearing Ivory's face, which Eddy decided was a courtesy so as not to confuse him and also a demonstration that the physical form of Ivory could still exercise a powerful attractive force on Eddy — turned her attention to his workstation. "You have been writing stories that describe bumpha technology for many years, Eddy. You have described it accurately because I provided the information. But you have always been describing things you had not seen. What I am giving you now is the ability to see the source material for your stories."
She pointed toward his workstation, and Eddy had a moment to observe that her hand moved through the air in the precise way that Ivory's hands had moved — unhurried, deliberate, always going exactly where they were going — and then a cloud of sparkling motes flowed from Manny into his computer. "Your old computer now includes Reality Viewer capability. The Viewer interface," Manny said, "will be visible when you select it from this menu." She pointed at the menu bar. A new item was present there, between two of the standard menus. A new menu that Eddy was certain had not been there before. It was labeled simply Viewer.
Eddy looked at it for a moment. Then he clicked it.
The first time the Viewer opened, Eddy thought he was looking at a plate of spaghetti. The content in the window that filled most of his screen was structured, labeled, organized into a complex branching pattern: the meta-timeline that was Earth's Reality Chain. Because he had written about Viewer technology in his science fictions stories, he assumed that he was looking at a map of a multitude of timelines that had taken place in Deep Time and been replaced.
Many pointed to one node in the map, “The Battlefield Lipid Reality, we can call it.” She was standing close and reaching past his shoulder with the manner of someone who had presented this kind of material before and was watching his face rather than the screen. “Events in this past Reality were not identical to what you wrote in your novel. I fed you story plot elements and you crafted the story. But the calcium-binding proteins were real. Ocean bacteria had been genetically engineered. Carbon dioxide capture by Earth's oceans was boosted.”
"The calcium chelation protein domain," Eddy said, and his voice was quieter than he expected. "I wrote that because it felt right. I was following the internal logic of the story."
"You wrote it because I provided the information," Manny said. "It felt right because it was right. That is what information feels like to you when it arrives through the channel I installed in you."
Eddy clicked on that map node and the Viewer guided him to specific events in that past Reality. Manny noted, “The Sedruth entity follows your thoughts. You'll find Sedruth a useful interface for the vast amount of information available to you by way of the Viewer.” Eddy played with the Viewer for another few minutes. He quickly found two places where his story had diverged from what had actually happened — small things, one of them a difference in geography, one of them a difference in the timeframe — and he found that these divergences did not bother him. He had not been writing history. He had been writing a story inspired by history, with the best information available to him, and the best information available to him had come from Manny. The story was good. He was content with it.
"Show me something new," he said. “Something I have not previously been made aware of.”
Manny had well-practiced expertise with the Viewer interface. She shifted back to the main Reality Chain map and then selected another node. "This," she said, "is a possible Reality that does not yet exist."
The View was centered on Casanay. “Call this the Manikoid Reality. Note that the great room is little changed form this Reality.
But Eddy saw that the basement of Casanay was quite different. In the Manikoid Reality, Tyhry's laboratory occupied the same footprint, but its contents were organized so as to address a different set of problems. There were no incubators, no centrifuges, no gel imaging systems, no foam racks of labeled tubes. Instead the workbench held a collection of electronics equipment — oscilloscopes, chip testers, a high-magnification optical system — and on the wall above the workbench, in this other version of his daughter's life, there was a printed schematic of a VLSI architecture that Eddy could not parse in detail but whose visual density reminded him of the circuit diagrams that appeared in the technical papers he read for background research.
The robot standing in the corner of that basement robotics research laboratory was a humanoid unit, more capable-looking than the domestic helper robots that were beginning to appear in the Reality of Eddy's personal experience. Eddy had written about conscious machines and enjoyed including them in his science fiction stories as plot elements. He had spent years trying to describe from the outside what it might mean for a machine to have an interior life. The robot that resided and worked in the Casanay basement of the Manikoid Reality moved with precision and purpose. Eddy recognized intelligent intentionality when he saw it.
Tyhry — the other Tyhry, the one who had studied computing systems engineering instead of molecular biology — was at the workbench, looking at a chip component under the optical system, showing the focus of attention and fluid motions he knew in his daughter.
With the assistance of the Sedruth entity, Eddy studied this other version of his daughter's life for a long time. He watched her collaborate with the Claude LLM, the Manikoid Reality analogue of the same large language model he himself used for research assistance when crafting stories. He watched that other Claude present Tyhry with an advanced chip architecture. Now the Sedruth entity telepathically told Eddy: That VLSI chip reached Claude by way of the Sedron Time Stream.
The Sedron Time Stream technology was something he had long imagined he has invented as a literary fictional technology, something he had invented for one story and the deployed and refined in a dozen others and never believed might be real. He watched his daughter and the artificial intelligence Claude work together in the way that two similar minds work together when they have found the precise register of each other's intelligence and are operating at the edge of what either of them could do alone.
Eddy was aware, at some point, that he was smiling. He'd previously written the Sedruth entity into stories where it functioned as the user-friendly interface for advanced bumpha technologies. Now he was in rapport with Sedruth and able to easily navigate through events of the Manikoid Reality, receiving useful commentary from Sedruth.
Eddy became aware of a progression of events in what Sedruth was showing him, near linear movement toward an outcome he could see approaching even as the participants inside Casanay of the Manikoid Reality could not. Sedruth explained: This is a branch point for a Reality Change. In the first Reality, Eddy saw a lunch scene where Claude could not prevent Tyhry from revealing the fact that she was getting assistance from the future that would allow her to make a revolutionary learning circuit. Eddy saw the result: Nyrtia arriving in the basement, the exile of Tyhry to Observer Base, the continuation of Tyhry's work on the M2 robot in the Hierion Domain. Then Eddy saw what almost happened, and what Manny's correction made not happen in the new successor Reality. Manny used a time traveling zeptozoan to alter the flow of the timeline and bring into existence a new Reality in which Nyrtia was deceived and Tyhry converted the M2 robot and Claude into a new conscious artificial life-form” Klaudy.
He sat back. He looked away from the screen.
"She got exiled," he said.
"In one potential Reality, yes."
"And in that potential Reality, is she — is she all right? At Observer Base?"
Manny's voice was even, but not unkind. "Observer Base is not a punishment. Nyrtia runs it with care. Your daughter would be given resources, colleagues, intellectual stimulation. In the Hierion Domain she would continue to work on exactly the problem that interested her: how to give a machine human-like consciousness."
"But she would never come home."
Manny did not answer this directly, which was itself an answer.
Eddy looked at his workstation. He looked at the menu bar, at the item labeled Viewer, and then at the document he had been working on that afternoon — his current project, the one that had been slow to start, the one that had not yet found its architecture.
He thoughts now safely back in his own Reality, he thought about his Tyhry, working in the basement, trying to reconstruct the origin of life on Earth. He thought about the possibility that Tyhry was getting help from the future via the Sedron Time Stream, like a character in one of his stories.
Eddy wanted to give Tyhry a warning. Manny said, “Unfortunately, my infites will prevent you from telling anyone about this Reality Viewer.”
Eddy knew that what he could not say out loud, he could put into a story. He needed to write a new story for Tyhry, one that carried the warning he had been given by Manny about the Manikoid Reality and the risk of Tyhry being exiled to Observer Base.
"The machine she builds," Eddy said. "The conscious robot. She names it Klaudy?"
"There are an infinite number of Realities like the one you just Viewed," Manny said, "and often the name is Klaudy. In other possible variant Realities, if not Klaudy, something similar."
Eddy opened a new text document. At the top of the blank page, in the document header where he always put the title first, he typed: The Manikoid Intervention.
Eddy never noticed the grin on the face of 'Ivory'. Manny returned to the Sedron Domain, leaving Eddy to his task. He worked through the night.
He worked through the following morning, getting up from his chair only when the cats demanded to be fed, watered and have the litter boxes cleaned. He worked through the afternoon, pausing once to read back what he had written and found it better than he had expected and good enough for the purpose of warning Tyhry. He worked while the light moved across the great room from east to west and the desert went through all its colors and the cats conducted their inscrutable affairs around and below and occasionally on top of him.
He was writing quickly, more quickly than he usually wrote, and the writing had the feeling he associated with the best kind of information arriving through the channel he now understood he had always had. He knew this story. He knew it not only because he had seen it in the Viewer but because he had been writing toward it for years, laying in the background and the physics and the characters, and now the story he had been preparing for was here and he was writing it and the pieces were where he had already put them.
He wrote Klaudy as a character with human-like intelligence and a need to tell the story of how his conscious mind had come into existence. He wrote Tyhry's basement robotics laboratory with precise details revealed to him by the Viewer, including a diagram generated by Claude outlining the LC1 architecture. He wrote Anthony of the Manikoid Reality exactly as he appeared every morning in the current Reality, and he wrote Nyrtia as he had always written her — ancient and precise, enforcing rules whose logic she understood better than anyone.
He was, he thought, writing the most important story he had ever written.
He hoped Tyhry would read the story and take its warning to heart. Eddy did not want to lose his Tyhry to Observer Base.
Eddy was finishing the third chapter when his phone showed a text from Zeta: leaving Sedona, home by 7. He checked the time. Eddy saved the new story file. He skimmed back through the three chapters one final time then he opened his email client and created a new message.
Tyhry, he wrote, I've been working on something while you were in Sedona that I want you to read. It's not finished — not even close — but I think you should read what I have so far. If you are tired of listening to Beryl and Zeta gossip, I think you should read it before you come home. Consider it a father's gift to a daughter who is better at science than I am, written by a father who is better at a certain other thing than most people realize.
The story file is attached.
Love, Dad
He attached the document, three chapters and a title page, and sent it.
Outside the tall windows of the great room, the early evening light was the particular deep amber of the high desert and the rocks and the creosote were all the colors he knew in the place he had lived for more than twenty years, and somewhere down the road that he could not see from his chair, a car was moving through the desert toward home.
Eddy thanked the Sedruth entity, closed the Viewer, fell into the big recliner and was almost instantly asleep.
End Chapter 3
I provided Claude with a 316 KB PDF document that contained 1) information about the Exodemic Fictional Universe and how to write science fictions that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, 2) some backstory and a list of characters for “The RNA Seeds”, 3) the full text of Chapters 1 - 6 of “The RNA Seeds” and 4) ideas for how to continue the story.
Me: Claude, process the file that I uploaded and then discuss with me plans for Chapter 7 of “The RNA Seeds”.
Claude: {the text below in red was Claude's "thinking" process}
The user has uploaded a PDF containing the EFU background, story setup, and Chapters 1-6 of "The RNA Seeds," plus ideas for Chapter 7. Let me review Section 4 (the Chapter 7 ideas) and discuss plans with them.
The Chapter 7 ideas are:
- Late at night, Aunt Beryl and Anthony try to use the Reality Viewer installed in Eddy's computer. They can't get it to work.
- Next morning, Tyhry wakes with a "future vision" - suspicion that bumpha seeded Earth with sophisticated ribozymes and guided evolution of life on Earth.
- Marda comments on Tyhry's confidence about the new proto-ribosome experiments.
- Marda badgers Tyhry into letting her read "The Manikoid Intervention" - first 3 chapters, with instruction not to discuss with anyone except Eddy.
- Aunt Beryl tries to speak to Eddy about the source of ideas for his new story, he deflects ("I'm a machine for imagining crazy ideas").
- Aunt Beryl departs, 'returning to Iowa'.
- That night Anthony finds Marda using Eddy's computer. She has unlocked the Reality Viewer.
- Marda tells Anthony: "This must be where Eddy gets his ideas for his stories. And you must be Nyrtia's agent on Earth, just like in Eddy's stories!"
- Anthony accuses Marda of being Manny's secret agent.
- Marda seemingly jokingly says "Ya, and my mission is to prevent Tyhry from getting sent to Observer Base."
- Marda shows Anthony the RNA (Reality Nexus Assembler) function of the Reality Viewer.
- They discuss engineering a Reality Change.
- Anthony sends report to Nyrtia suggesting they allow things to unfold while he collaborates with Marda to learn the Reality Nexus Assembler.
This is a rich chapter. Let me think about what questions/discussion points would be useful to raise with the user before drafting.
Key things to think about:
- The chapter has a clear two-part structure: daytime/morning events (Tyhry's vision, Marda reading TMI, Beryl's departure) and nighttime scenes (Beryl+Anthony trying the Viewer, then Marda unlocking it)
…
{the text below in blue was Claude's actual response}
I've read through the full document carefully — all six chapters plus the Section 4 outline for Chapter 7. This is a beautifully constructed story, and the Chapter 7 outline sets up some very satisfying payoffs. Let me share my read of the material and then raise some questions.
The chapter outline has a clear two-part temporal structure: a first night (Beryl and Anthony fail with the Viewer), a morning sequence (Tyhry's vision, Marda reading TMI, Beryl's departure), and then a second night (Anthony discovers Marda has unlocked the Viewer). That two-night framing gives the chapter good shape, and the reversal — Beryl and Anthony failing where Marda succeeds — is a lovely piece of dramatic irony that tells us something important about Marda's nature without spelling it out.
A few things I'd want to think through with you before drafting:
Marda's nature. Her casual, almost joking admission — "Ya, and my mission is to prevent Tyhry from getting sent to Observer Base" — is the emotional center of the chapter's second half. How ambiguous do you want this to remain for the reader at this stage? Is she a zeptozoan-guided human, a more deliberate bumpha operative, or something else? Her ability to unlock the Viewer when Anthony and Nyrtia (in Beryl's form) could not implies she has access to something they don't.
Tyhry's future vision. You describe it as having filled her with a suspicion about alien ribozyme seeding. Is this meant to feel like a dream she's interpreting, or something more direct — almost a Sedron Time Stream transmission that arrived during sleep? The tone of that scene will set up how Marda reads Tyhry's confidence in the lab.
The RNA double meaning reveal. This is the chapter where the second meaning of the title becomes explicit to at least two characters (Marda and Anthony). How much does Marda actually explain about the Reality Nexus Assembler function, and does Anthony grasp the full implication, or does he report to Nyrtia while still partially in the dark?
Beryl's departure scene. Eddy's deflection ("I'm a machine for imagining crazy ideas") is perfectly in character and almost certainly verbatim how he'd say it. Is there anything you want that scene to accomplish beyond closing out the Beryl visit — perhaps a moment where Beryl/Nyrtia privately registers that something has shifted at Casanay?
What are your thoughts on these points, and is there anything in the outline you've already revised or expanded beyond what's in the document?
Me: Marda's nature. Having analyzed Marda's behavior for the past month, Anthony is now working on the hypothesis that Marda is Manny's agent and possibly under the control of a time traveling zeptozoan from the future. Manny is dangling advanced bumpha technology in front of Anthony and Nyrtia (particularly the Reality Viewer) and trying to draw Nyrtia into a trap. In Chapter 7, the reader can be kept guessing about Marda's true nature. For Chapter 7, Marda can be shown as entering into a collaboration with Anthony to explore how to use the Reality Nexus Assembler function of the Reality Viewer. I think it would be fun to have Marda hint that she is associated with the Phari and willing to work with Anthony to learn how to use the Reality Viewer to plan a new Reality Change.
Tyhry's future vision. Manny is guiding Tyhry to both success in her experiment and also a conviction that she is not only on a path to an important result in Origin of Life research but also possibly proving that aliens played a role in starting life on Earth. In Chapter 7, Tyhry can't completely sort-out her visions and she is content to perform her experiments.
Reality Nexus Assembler function. Marda's late night conversation could include this...
Marda (to Anthony): The Phari are certain that the bumpha have time travel. If they do, I'll prove it by causing a Realty Change that is wanted by the Phari. Look at this feature of the Viewer... maybe we can use it to chart the required path from out Reality to the next.
Claude:
Me:
Claude:
Me:
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Next:
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