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| What is Manny brewing up? |
As part of my effort to put an end to Claude's endless obsession with 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. For scene 1 of Chapter 6, Gemini invented a strange appearance Tyhry 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
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| Marda and Tyhry. Image generated by Gemini. |
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.
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
"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."
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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.
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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.”
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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."
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
“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."
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
"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."
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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."
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?"
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| Image by ImageFX. |
"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."
"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.”
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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.
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| Manny. Image generated by Gemini. |
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.
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| Ely. Image generated by Gemini. |
"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?”
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
"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.
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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?"
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
"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
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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."
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
"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 bench in front of the laboratory, gazing at the beach and the water beyond. Tyhry could telepathically sense that Ely was 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. Tyhry was concerned about leaving Ely alone on Asha with the three humans.
"How long do you plan to stay here?" Tyhry asked Ely.
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| Image by WOMBO Dream. |
"You'll report to Manny."
"Yes, I'll continue to report to Manny. And also to you, whenever you drop in for a visit." Ely paused. "I believe in this world. I want you to know that, Tyhry. The children who grow up here without a G-sim until they are eight years old — they will have normal human curiosity and a craving for adventure. These children will want to explore Yrmya without having to be told to do it."
Tyhry watched Trib the cat emerge from a patch of thick vegetation. Tyhry could feel the telepathic mind pattern of the femtozoan that had attached itself to Trib. Tyhry was startled when Trib the cat suddenly split in two. One copy of Trib walked to the beach while the other walked to Tyhry and rubbed against her legs before continuing to walk along the front of the laboratory building.
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| Ely the Grendel with the two copies of Trib the cat. |
"Yes, that is exactly what Trib has in mind." Ely giggled. "I've provided Trib with several sets of new femtobots that carry some very useful programs."
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| The two Trib copies in human and Grendel form. This image was flagged as "too sexual" for both Leonardo and Goggle's Flow. |
The other copy of Trib winked at Tyhry and telepathically told Tyhry: I've always had the ability to take on other forms, but when Manny sent me to Casanay, she requested that I retain the form of a cat as long as I was involved in my mission on Earth. Trib the cat then morphed back into cat form and continued hunting insects.
Just then, the Ary arrived back on Asha by long-range teleportation from Tiz. The Ary telepathically told Tyhry: We'll see you onboard HySe. They teleported up to the spaceship.
Tyhry was still telepathically connected to Ary. "They are ready to go."
Trib the cat telepathically told Tyhry: Let's get out of here, Tyhry. Let's find those new worlds that Manny dangled in front of you. Trib was relieved to no longer have to hide the truth about itself from Tyhry, but Tyhry could telepathically sense Trib's intention to continue using its cat form when in the presence of the Ary clones. This world does not need you anymore, but we'll be back for visits. I suppose you will always feel proud of how you gave human telepathy its beginning in this Reality. This was said with the affection of someone who has spent a long time learning about Tyhry.
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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."
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| Image generated by Gemini. |
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
Here (below) is a short video depicting the femtobot replicoids of Trib the cat morphing.
The first clip in this video (above) was generated by MindVideo. Text prompt: "The two cats de-materialize into two clouds of tiny sparkling particles and then quickly re-materialize into the shapes of a woman (on the left side of the scene) and an alien humanoid figure (on the right side of the scene) while the humanoid alien who is in the center of the scene says, “My replicoid copies of Trib the cat will keep me entertained.”" The second video clip was generated by Pixelbin which did not generate any audio, so I re-used the MindVideo-generated audio.
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