Reality Engineering

"Life, death: these are imprecise terms." -Jack Vance, The Palace of Love

I've been "on vacation", trying to untangle the truth about my own past. At the end of June,  Gohrlay revealed the fact that in the First Reality, what we think of as the human species, almost became extinct. The pek were working diligently to replace "our kind" with a modified form of primate that would be easier to merge into Genesaunt society.

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Gohrlay herself was among the last remaining humans. Imagine my surprise when I recently learned that Gohrlay was not a Neanderthal who died 20,000 years ago, but is rather, alive and living on Earth. That revelation raised questions about her parents and, by extension, my parents.

I decided that I'd be a fool if I missed the opportunity to collect samples of my parents' DNA. I quickly arranged to visit my parents and now the DNA test results are in. As far a Earthly science can tell, my parents are my biological parents and there is nothing unusual about their DNA.

Human life in the year 2015 of the First Reality.

So, why was I suddenly overcome by doubts about my origins? Given Gohrlay's refusal to explain the conditions of her own birth, I'd been lead to entertain two possibilities:

1) That given a specific human being (Gohrlay), it might be possible to design her parents "from scratch" and create a new "copy" of that human, genetically identical to the original. This would involve advanced nanites with the ability to make sure that a knew zygote was produced with exactly the right chromosomes.

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2) Maybe the pek have access to the "pattern" of every human who was ever born. It would be trivial to instantiate copies of Gohrlay's parents on Earth even if they died 20,000 years ago.

3) Maybe when certain humans are "inserted" into the historical timeline of Earth, they are not genetically related to their Earthly parents. Advanced nanites might cause such an individual to have a "family resemblance", but that is just a "cover" that hides the unusual origin of such people.

Of course, my hypotheses were all wrong. It turns out that in the First Reality, Gohrlay was born in 1960 and in the Final Reality she was born in 1960. This is a good example of Temporal momentum at work.

In the First Reality, Gohrlay was born on the Moon and in the Final Reality she was born in the Galactic Core, but R. Gohrlay arranged that Gohrlay be here on Earth when time travel was made impossible and when the Buld Spaceship arrived.

I'm astounded by the audacity of the Reality Engineering that R. Gohrlay accomplished. In the First Reality, the pek had nearly replaced the human population of Earth with a Preland-like human variant. Here, in the Final Reality, we humans have inherited the Earth and we have been given a chance to reach the stars.

The term "life" has a different meaning for Gohrlay. She began as an ordinary human, but her physical features were modified by developmental control nanites that gave her a more Preland-like form.

For 10,000,000 years she existed as an artificial life form. Then, most recently, she re-entered into the domain of biological life, existing as what I know as a tryp'At, but with full access to memories from her former "life".

And what about death? Can such a creature ever die?

Next: Life by the Numbers.

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