Been There

in the Ekcolir Reality
original cover art by Frank Freas (also)

My life was recently turned inside-out by the arrival of Yōd and Zeta on Earth. The three of us have been arguing about the proper way to tell the story of Deep Time. Now that I have had a week to study Yōd, I'm ready to reach some conclusions about her special "features". Yōd is genetically the prototypical human since she is a clone of Gohrlay. However, she was never allowed to develop as a normal human being. Her embryonic development was warped and shifted by a special developmental control program.

What is the phenotype of Yōd? I do believe that I had a brief glimpse of her true physical form (described here). She appeared to me a morphologically normal human female, but since she was crafted so as to fit into the society of Tar'tron, she may well be a hermaphroditic. Further, I can't rule out the possibility that while on board Many Sails, Yōd may have altered her appearance so as not to alarm Asimov.

in the Ekcolir Reality
original cover art by Frank Freas

More importantly, we must ask: what about her brain and her cognitive apparatus? I've tried to find out if Yōd grew up on Tar'tron with the ability to use technology-assisted telepathy. Of even greater concern to me is the question of whether or not her brain is able to utilize a femtobot or zeptite endosymbiont for access to either the Hierion Doman or the Sedronic Domain. Frustratingly, when I ask such questions of Yōd she either ignores my questions or makes cute comments such as, "A girl should be allowed to keep some secrets."

Yōd insists that she has a well-defined mission on Earth and she is not going to let me interfere with her efficient completion of that mission. That is the kind of challenge that I cannot pass up. Thus, Yōd and I are currently locked in a battle of wills: I want to discover her secrets and she wants me to instead perform my assigned task: writing down the secret history of Humanity.

our Reality Chain

The Asimov Reality
The particular part of Deep Time that has become my shared obsession with Yōd is what I have come to think of as the Asimov Reality. In the Foundation Reality, the analog of Isaac Asimov was allowed to imagine that because of a freak accident he had a close encounter with alien visitors to Earth. Asimov then quickly became involved with a time travel mission that allowed him to meet his younger self and bring into existence a new Reality: the Asimov Reality.

Yōd and I are investigating the tricks and schemes that were used by R. Gohrlay and Grean in the Asimov Reality while they were busy searching through the vast human genetic state space. When we poor humans were created, it had never been intended that we would use the Bimanoid Interface. However, because of the freakish arrival of positronic robots in the universe, it became necessary to make corrections to human nature.

Creating the Ek'col

The solution to the problem that confronted R. Gohrlay and Grean was to make use of the alien Phari of Alastor Cluster. There the Phari had long ago carried out a program of pantropy (Blish) and they were masters at subverting the zeptite endosymbionts of the pek.

In our Reality, James Blish told many stories about adapting humans to the environments of other worlds. However, in the Ekcolir Reality, the analogue of Blish was a woman named Jamie and her stories about pantropy were inspired by actual events in the Asimov Reality.

Ivory Fersoni provided me with summaries of several stories from the Ekcolir Reality that were written by Jamie Blish. Apparently most of her "pantropy" stories were part of what was known as the Nanotropy Series, published by Blish under the name "Karol Khide". Alpha Gohrlay held the opinion that stories published under the name 'Karol Khide' in the Ekcolir Reality were actually produced by a team of authors that included Jamie and the analogues of Virginia Kidd and Carol Emshwiller (see
V. Kidd and Carol Fries Emshwiller).

According to Gohrlay, Jamie, Virginia and Carol were, "the Ekcolir Reality analogue of the Dead Widowers". Apparently those three ladies managed to go a few steps too far in telling the future history of First Contact with the Fru'wu in the Ekcolir Reality, and some of their stories were 'retracted' by Earth's Overseers. However, their many stories based on actual events in the Asimov Reality were quite influential.

In the Asimov Reality, R. Gohrlay and Grean could do rational design of new human variants as a first approximation, but then they needed an efficient search algorithm to "fine tune" the results in a way that would minimize the planned violation of the Rules of Intervention for Earth.

In the Ekcolir Reality
original cover art by Virgil Finlay
Inset: see "Orb 5" by Jessica Truscott

In order to prepare Earthlings for the idea that the Phari could control the orbit of Alastor Cluster around the Galactic Core, many examples of planetary engineering were "built into" our galaxy in the Asimov Reality. For technologically advanced artificial life forms like the Phari and the pek, moving planets around the galaxy was no more difficult than picking up a house and moving it across town is for we Earthlings. According to Yōd, the Rigel Concourse was created as an early laboratory for human genetics experiments.

In the Asimov Reality

Today I had an argument with Yōd about the effects on human psychology and our species' confidence to have it be demonstrated that aliens were able to move planets around and create artificial star systems like the Rigel Concourse. She admits that there are some powers of the Huaoshy that are particularly demoralizing for primitives to learn about, but her claim is that planetary engineering is not one of these.

Of course, when I pressed for details about advanced Huaoshy technologies, very little was forthcoming. Interestingly, the tight-lipped Yōd did let slip one interesting fact. The replicoid of Radhas is now working together with the replicoids of Zeta and Yod in the Hierion Domain. I believe that the remarkable ability of Yōd to quickly understand events in Deep Time is made possible by help that she is receiving from that team of replicoids.

Taivasila: site of more experiments

A major current source of frustration for me is that in the Ekcolir Reality there was a detailed published account of how humans were genetically modified and equipped with the required femtobot adaptors so as to make it possible for humans to use the Bimanoid Interface. In some sense, in this struggle by we humans to understand our origins in Deep Time, some science fiction writers have already "been there and done that".

However, so far I have only been provided with terse summaries of the published science fiction stories from the Ekcolir Reality that provided Earthlings with that account of human genetic modification.

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In some sense, I am now suffering in the Final Reality as result of a powerful temporal momentum that requires a similar account of past events in the Asimov Reality to be written here in this Reality, but the tryp'At Overseers are forcing me to write that account while under strict limitations on my knowledge of the details of what actually happened in the Asimov Reality.

Next: return to the First Reality

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