Lankster House

Lydya Lankster

It's About Time
As part of my process of writing the Exode Saga backwards, there is now a new chapter at the beginning of A Search Beyond. That introductory chapter features Lydya and Myryn Lankster, who have worked for 20 years preparing Nirutam to operate on Earth as an Interventionist agent.

Actually, the hope is that Nirutam will function more as a judge, to decide along with Dani that the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact have been met. The opening scene of A Search Beyond takes place in the year 2017. The second chapter of the story jumps ahead in time to 2019 when Many Sails is approaching Earth.

Mind clones 3; Nora, Nirutam and Myryn.

Special Case: Nora
Nirutam's first task on Earth is to check on Nora. Nora once functioned on Earth as an Interventionist, but her memories were "sanitized" so as to make it impossible for her to share with the people of Earth information about advanced technologies of alien origin. Nirutam had to convince herself that Nora's continuing presence on Earth is harmless.

To allow Nirutam to intimately probe the mind of Nora, she was designed to be Nora's mind clone. Half of Nirutam's brain was shaped to match Nora's brain and the other half was guided by developmental control nanites to adopt the structure of Myryn's right brain. Nirutam grew up with Myryn always present and she never noticed that she was telepathically linked to the unseen Myryn.

image source

Upon reaching Earth, Nirutam made use of her left brain to probe the memories and thoughts of Nora. Their mind patterns were similar enough that Nirutam could instantly apply her G-sym to a deep probe of Nora's thoughts. Nora could sense that there was an unusual cognitive link between herself and Nirutam, but it would take time and practice for her to re-learn how to use the Bimanoid Interface and access Nirutam's thoughts.

During the time that Nirutam was studying Nora, she became familiar with Rylla. It is interesting to speculate about the extent to which Nirutam played a role in motivating Rylla to adopt her role as the "agonist". The fact is, it was not long after Nirutam's arrival on Earth that Rylla began her adventure as part of what I view as Earth's mind clone network.

Expanded MC3 sub-network.

There has always been a strange asymmetry in the the mind clone network, a gap, that I previously imagined could be filled if I knew who it was on the Buld spaceship who could telepathically link to Nora as part of what I thought of as the MC3 sub-network.

Rylla suspects that while Lydya was teaching Nirutam about Earthly culture, they had access to the same data that in the past was automatically transmitted from the zeptites of Earth to Observer Base (see Lightmare). That data channel stopped functioning just about exactly when we estimate that Nirutam left home and began her long journey from the Andromeda galaxy to Earth.

The fain: a human-alien hybrid (source).

Myryn Mystery
I can't resist speculating about the role played by Myryn during Nirutam's visit to Earth. In some sense, Myryn's presence was cheating; it secretly allowed the pek to have two agents on Earth while the bumpha only had Dani on the "other side". However, Zeta suggests that if complete book keeping is performed, then we really need to count Nora as an agent of the bumpha who has taken on a permanent assignment on here on Earth. Similarly, is Myryn still here?

The idea that Nirutam, an alien fain from the Andromeda galaxy, can share brain structure and mind a pattern with Nora is telling us something remarkable about the human-alien hybrids that have been crafted by the pek. While we here on Earth might hybridize a lion and a tiger, the pek apparently have no trouble engineering much more complex hybrids.

from the archives of the Writer Block

Previously, I've concerned myself with the issue of how to define the boundaries of what might be categorized as "human". The fain are amazingly close, but with a different genetic system that has so far defied my ability to characterize it; I must continue to view Nirutam as an alien.

The fain usually have very little hair, but Nirutam had been taught how to disguise herself as a human. While I knew her, Nirutam always wore a wig and painted on eyebrows. When I first saw Nirutam, she was already aging rapidly. Luckily, Rylla's collaborators who have access to the Writers Block have found that Lydya's connections to Observer Base were two-way. As recently as a few years ago she was able to deposit stories in the archives of the Writers Block, providing us with information about the biology of young, healthy fain.

Next: return to 2012

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