Archive Worlds

Gohrlay adopts the physical form
of a Kac'hin female

In my previous blog post I began to sketch out some details of the world Taivasila. In particular, I imagine Taivasila as a planet of the artificial, a world with no star, a rogue planet that is populated by artificial life forms. For example, when Gohrlay, a lonely Neanderthal from Earth is "sent to Taivasila", the cognitive pattern of her mind is extracted from her body and instantiated within a synthetic body on Taivasila.

So perfect is the alien technology that allows such a mind transfer that, at least at first, this "copy of Gohrlay" does not even notice that "she" is in a new body. Told that she would be teleported to Taivasila, she assumes that she arrives there still in her biological body. Eventually this new "copy of Gohrlay" discovers that she can take on any convenient physical form since her new body is composed of tiny devices that are able to assemble themselves into any desired shape.

The Pek Archives

Green ringed planet by Bryseyas

One of the larger holes remaining in The Foundations of Eternity is the chapter that I long ago called "The Planet Imfulri". In my earlier thinking about the Exode Trilogy I assumed that planets such as Imfulri were "quarantined" and kept as "zoo worlds" by the positronic robots who spread out through our galaxy. However, I was never satisfied with that approach to "dealing with" the existence of other inhabited worlds such as the home world of the Fru'wu.

A more satisfying strategy is for the pek to "evacuate" each populated world of the galaxy in advance of the arrival of positronic robots as they spread outward from Earth. Rather than isolate "zoo worlds" under the control of positronic robots, the pek can maintain "Archive Worlds". In keeping with pek preferences for "sister planets", I've decided that Taivasila is a "sister planet" for Imfulri.

In the cover image above that includes a ringed green planet, imagine that both Imfulri and Taivasila have been engineered to generate their own light. Rather than reflecting the light of a nearby star, such worlds are visible because they glow with their own light. The residents of Imfulri (known as the "Ressese") long ago developed space elevator technology and so there is a heavily populated ring of space stations in orbit around the planet.

When creating the archive world Imfulri, the pek wanted to create a "place keeper" for an entire civilization. The pek anticipated a future time when the positronic robots of Earth would no longer dominate the galaxy and the 20 other sapient species of the galaxy, including the Ressese, could be allowed to return to their home planets.

Related Reading: Gohrlay returns to Earth

Clu'ten'iun as an "archive world": see this blog post.