Write the Future

keeping an eye on Earth (image source)

Many years ago (see Foundations of Eternity), when I first began imagining how the positronic robots (probots) of Earth would loose control of Eternity, I had no backstory explaining how R. Gohrlay prepared Earth for the goal of creating Galaxia. 

Change

Now that I've completed "Hierion Writers Club" (15,000 words) some of that backstory is now in place. There is still a remaining opportunity to provide details about of how Mary used the Writers Block to support social and technological change on Earth, but the basics have now been provided, at least in outline.

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At the start of "Hierion Writers Club", Mary has already had contact with Wendy the positronic robot. During her visits to Earth, Wendy has infected Mary with infites. Those infites have provided Mary with some rudimentary knowledge about both 1) her telepathic abilities and 2) the existence of infites, but as long as Mary remains on Earth, Wendy is reluctant to allow Mary to become consciously aware of her links to the Hierion Domain. 

 

Wendy the probot

Mary also "knows" that Wendy can teleport to and from Earth and Wendy has confessed to being an artificial lifeform, but Mary's infites keep this knowledge just below the level of her conscious awareness. Still, Mary has begun writing stories that incorporate elements of her hidden knowledge. As soon as a copy of Mary is teleported to Nanoville, she is allowed to consciously access her "hidden knowledge" and quickly comes to understand how the positronic robots intend that she send story ideas to Earth using the Bimanoid Interface.

by George Dyson

Samuel Butler 

I included just a glimpse of Samuel Butler in part 2 of "Hierion Writers Club" because I depict Mary's grandmother, Elizabeth (born Elizabeth Dixon), as being involved in the design and construction of Nanoville. R. Nyrtia is using the nanorealm as an experimental environment, exploring how to transform a group of humans into a super-organism with a unified group mind.

 

Samuel wrote "Darwin among the Machines", and it is fun to imagine that he could be brought into Elizabeth's life in order to help her imagine a future in which humans, programmed genetically with the equivalent of the three laws of robotics, might form a group mind. I like to think that Elizaabeth and Samuel worked to build a form of technology-assisted telepathy into the structure of everything in Nanoville.

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Charlotte Burke

The character Charlotte Burke in "Hierion Writers Club" is loosely based on Charlotte Turner. I needed Charlotte in my story because of the way Isaac Asimov wrote about Gaia and Blissenobiarella (Bliss, for short) in his Foundation Saga.

 

Here is a typical bit of dialogue from Bliss, a young woman and an integral component of the group mind Gaia: "You must understand, Trevize, that we are not interested in you as a person... you are only important as a conduit to the truth..." As impersonal as Bliss sounds, she takes the elderly archeologist Pelorat as her lover and Asimov enjoyed telling readers just how much the planet Gaia (and its 1,000,000,000 human residents) all enjoyed sharing in the experience of their love making.

Asterothropes, path to Galaxia

Sadly, for "Hierion Writers Club", Charlotte only gets to telepathically share her "bliss" with about a thousand people at a time, but remember, Nanoville is just a test laboratory for exploring techniques that might allow Gaia to be constructed thousands of years in the future.

In my imagination, the main problem facing R. Nyrtia is how to modify the human gene pool so as to bring into existence a galaxy full of telepathic people, and do so without violating the laws of robotics. Perhaps the greatest challenge for the positronic robots is how to avoid altering the essence of what it means to be human while bringing Galaxia into being. The "probots" went down a similar path previously when they created the telepathic Asterothropes. The Asterothropes provided a useful source of gene patterns, but they were not human beings; they were a different species of primate and not covered by the laws of robotics.

the character Pols is loosely based on Mari

Mari Wolf

Mari Wolf is probably most widely known for having used the term "droid" in her 1952 story "Robots of the World! Arise!" (see If, July 1952). For "Hierion Writers Club", I wanted to illustrate how Grean's arrival in Eternity would derail the plans of the probots. It was fun to imagine that in the Foundation Reality, Mari had been used by the probots to help introduce Earthlings to the idea of robots with super-human cognitive abilities. 

 

Next: part 1 of "The Galaxiad"

In the 21st century of the Foundation Reality, an artificial intelligence system provided humans with a form of interstellar spaceship drive (similar to what Asimov depicted in his story "Escape!"). Earthlings had to be prepared for the idea that an artificial lifeform could solve a problem like inventing a working interstellar hyperspace drive, even when humans could not crack the problem. By providing a hyperspace drive, the probots to greatly accelerate the process of spreading humans through the galaxy without actually needing to allow Humanity to develop a highly advanced technological society. 

The Edge of Galaxia

I've now written a new 7,000 word story called "The Galaxiad" about the development of Galaxia, in the time just before Grean arrives on Earth to begin her take-over of Eternity.

 

Related Reading: 2021 "The Alastor Network"

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