The 2023 SIHA Award

The 2023 SIHA Award.

 Time Travel: 55 years into the past. Each year I search for interesting aliens in Hollywood (see the 2022 SIHA). Here in 2023, the SIHA award is a retro-SIHA for the Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth" (originally shown on television in 1968).

 Artificial Intelligence Trek. Most of the images in this blog post were AI-generated (but not the one shown to the right). Back in April of this year, I tried to collaborate with the AI-powered chatbots Bard and ChatGPT in an attempt to write a kind of sequel to the Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth". 

 Here's Looking At You. Later, in July, Bard was given the ability to discuss images that are uploaded by users during chat sessions with Bard (see my blog post "Bard Images."). When asked by users, what does Bard have to say about AI-generated images?

cat-like aliens by Mr. Wombo

 An AI chatbot evaluates an AI-generated image. I just asked Bard to comment on the image that is shown to the left (the entire conversation is here). This image of cat people was generated by WOMBO Dream. I asked, "Bard, do you think that these two alien cat people in this AI-generated image might be what Gene Roddenberry would have imagined for the true physical form of Isis?"

 Yada yada yada. Bard's reply was rather long-winded (as usual for Google's loquatious chatbot), but it included this: "Overall, the AI-generated image provides a compelling and visually stunning interpretation of what Gene Roddenberry may have imagined for the true physical form of the alien Isis. It is a vision that is both beautiful and mysterious, reflecting Roddenberry's optimistic view of the future and his belief in the potential for positive change."

Assignment: Earth book cover

 Bard Blather. Sadly, I have no confidence that Bard actually could "see" the image. Bard has seemingly been designed to tell human users what they want to hear. This is the text prompt that was used with WOMBO Dream (which I refer to as "Mr. Wombo") to generate the "cat-like aliens" image (above): "Full color science fiction book cover illustration showing alien cats, dressed Victoria's Secret style, sparkling jewelry, exoplanet background".

 Humanoid Cats. An AI-generated book cover illustration for an imaginary novel called Assignment: Earth is shown in the image to the right. I pasted in images of Earth and Mars and added the title, but the rest of this image was generated by Mr. Wombo. To get the human-like hand, I had to paste into the reference image a human hand and I used: "Full color science fiction book cover illustration showing an alien cat, dressed Victoria's Secret style, sparkling jewelry, a human-like hand holding a crystal ball, exoplanet background".

Assignment: Earth, the movie.

 Mystery. One of the long-standing mysteries about Assignment: Earth was the identity of the actress who played the alien "cat woman" Isis in that episode of Star Trek. In 2019 it was finally revealed that the actress was April Tatro.

 Image Composite. For the image that is shown to the left, I pasted in 1) an image of the Moon, 2) a tiny image of the Enterprise, 3) the text, and 4) an image of Isis the cat from the 1968 television show. The rest of the image was generated by WOMBO Dream.

 Backstory for Gary Seven and Isis. I got Bard to help me invent the name "Zyny" for the aliens who long ago established a colony of humans on the distant exoplanet Zyphyra (see this chat session). Gary Seven was born on Zyphyra and is the seventh clone of a telepathic mind clone network that is known as the "Gary" network.

Gary Seven meets Isis.

 Birthday Boy. When Gary Seven was three years old (this is slightly more than four Earth years old, given the difference in the orbits of Earth and Zyphyra) he was given a pet cat by the Zyny. This "pet cat" is actually a shape-shifting alien artificial life form composed of nanites that quickly establishes telepathic communication with Gary Seven. 

 Home on the Exoplanet. I had DALL-E 3 create an image depicting: "a high resolution science fiction movie still showing a four year old Robert Lansing playing with a black kitten, Robert is dressed in futuristic clothing, a futuristic house interior in the background". I then used that DALL-E-generated scene as a reference image with WOMBO Dream (the resulting image is shown to the right). The human colonists on Zyphyra refer to their "pets" as the "Zyn" and even after 6,000 years those colonists on Zyphyra still only had a vague understanding of the Zyny.

Some Gary mind clones.

 Shape-shifting. In my imagination, the Zyny have moved themselves into the Hierion Domain, but they make use of nanorobotic helpers that exist in the Hadron Domain, the universe as we humans know it. Those nanorobotic helpers of the Zyny are known to the human residents on Zyphyra as the Zyn. The Zyn are shape-shifters, composed of femtobots and able to take on any convenient physical form.

 Telepathy. The Zyn are telepathically linked to the Zyny and each Zyn, such as Isis, is designed so as to be able to telepathically communicate to its human "owner". The question becomes, why did the young Gary Seven give the name "Isis" to his Zyn? I imagine that the process went something like this...

 Why use the name "Isis"?
Gary Seven had eagerly awaited his third birthday and the arrival of his personal Zyn. As soon as he touched the small black kitten, there was a wind-like voice whistling in his head: Hello, Gary. 

Figure 1. Vesta the "cat woman" by DALL-E.

However, those two words only gradually emerged from a much larger bundle of concepts and words that were suddenly bouncing around in Gary's mind. He spoke out-loud to the cat, "Is that you?" But he could not restrain the flood of other thoughts that were in his mind, swirling around all that he had heard about telepathic contact with the Zyn.

Gary Seven was not a telepathic novice. He had gestated in constant telepathic contact to his mother and he was also quite familiar with the minds of the other Gary mind clones. Gary's telepathic contacts to other humans had all been relatively shallow linkages, allowing exchange of mostly language-like information and a few touches of emotions. 

Figure 2. by WOMBO Dream

Now, some of the telepathic signals from the kitten clearly synchronized with its movements, but others were more mysterious. Vast and new conceptual spaces suddenly opened up in Gary's mind, creating a thought vortex that Gary had never previously experienced. Gary had seen historical/educational depictions of the ancient times when humans from Earth had first been brought to Zyphyra. Gary asked, "You brought us here from Earth?"

Gary's parents exchanged glances. His mother said, "He must be speaking to the Zyny!"

Gary's father muttered, "Don't fill his mind with nonsense."

Most people on Zyphyra could never link their minds to the Zyny and a few were genetic throw-backs who could not even telepathically communicate to their own personal Zyn. With rather limited telepathic ability, Gary's father thought that reports of mental contact with the Zyny were simply religious nonsense. 

Figure 3. Vesta by Mr. Wombo.

However, Gary's mother had a powerful telepathic mind and a genetic pattern that allowed her Phari endosymbiont to link her mind efficiently to her own Zyn and on to the Zyny. She had worked hard to exercise Gary Seven's telepathic mind and prepare him to be able to efficiently link his own mind to that of his Zyn.

Gary Seven had been warned by his mother to remain silent while telepathically communicating, particularly when in the presence of weak telepaths like his father. The kitten looked into Gary's eyes and he thought he "heard": I did. But his mind echoed with other concepts: We is I. I is I is. I is the one. I is the we. I help Earth. I help humanity. I help Gary. I need Gary. Gary genes are good... The thoughts of the Zyny rolled on, endlessly. Most of the telepathic information stream from the Zyny passed into Gary Seven's brain and found no points of resonance and only baffled the boy. It would be decades before Gary could fully control his telepathic powers.

Figure 4. Vesta the scholar.

However, I is I is somehow resonated with Gary's mind. And when Gary Seven's mother asked him, "Do you have a name for your Zyn?" he replied, "I'll call her I-is-i-is!"

Gary's mother said, "Oh! Isis is a nice name!"

     __________________

 Vesta the Vegan. Back in the 1970s when I was discovering science fiction as a written literary genre, I read every story by Edward Elmer Smith (including The Vortex Master) that I could find and I was introduced to an alien who adopted the name Vesta. Here is how Smith described Vesta: "a supple, lithe, pantherish girl with vertically-slitted yellow eyes, pointed ears, and a long and sinuous, meticulously-groomed tail". Figure 1, above, shows the cat woman that was produced by DALL-E 3 to go along with that description of Vesta. 

April Tatro as Isis (humanoid form)

I then used Figure 1 as a reference image with WOMBO Dream to make the imaginary book cover that is shown in Figure 2 (above) for a book that Smith never wrote called "The Vesta Vortex".

 Figure 3 (above) shows a very furry version of Vesta that was generated by Mr. Wombo without the help of a reference image from DALL-E. I had to paste some human-like hands into this image.

 Human-Cat Hybrids. As imagined by E. E. Smith, Vesta was language scholar who knew 50 languages. She was useful to have around on a spaceship during galactic adventures (see Figure 4, above). I don't know why Mr. Wombo added the small human figure to Figure 4.

Are those cat ears?

It is possible that E. E. Smith's cat-like alien character, Vesta, was my first exposure to the idea of a space alien that is physically similar to an Earthly cat, but it was about at the same time that I saw the Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth" in fuzzy black and white television images. 

Apparently, the make-up crew for Star Trek tried to give April Tatro some cat-like features including cat-like ears that were made from some of the hair in her wig, but I could never see details like that when I watched Star Trek re-runs on a very small T.V. screen back when I was in my personal Golden Age of science fiction.

humanoid cat by Mr. Wombo

It was a major struggle to try to get Mr. Wombo to generate a reasonable human-cat hybrid. For the image to the right I used this text prompt: "high resolution full color movie still showing the pink human face of Meg Ryan, human mouth and nose, Meg Ryan is twenty years old, Meg Ryan is cute girl, Meg Ryan has a human face, Meg Ryan has long white whiskers, a futuristic alien city in the background, Meg Ryan is dressed Victoria's Secret style". The image shown to the right is one of the the more interesting human-cat hybrids that was generated by Mr. Wombo. There are some more variations on this theme in the image at the bottom of this blog post.

 Creative Block. I suppose an "Assignment: Earth" television show could not really be produced until this millennium. Maybe fans have been kept waiting in order to allow for computer software to be developed that can be used to create interesting visual depictions of aliens like Isis the shape-shifter.

1960 space opera Vesta.

Much of the online commentary that has been written for "Assignment: Earth" completely fails to even discuss the idea of unseen aliens secretly guiding Humanity into the future. One person who totally bought into this concept of helpful aliens was Dayton Ward. 

2023 cat-faced Vesta.
Who's looking at her face?

E. E. Smith often described space aliens as being from warm planets and not being particularly concerned with wearing clothing. 

For the image that is shown to the left, Mr. Wombo allowed the cat-like alien woman to have human-like skin instead of the fur used in Figure 3.

 Over in the lower nipple universe. For the image shown to the right, Mr. Wombo depicted Vesta as having a very feline head. Yes, this is pretty much how I imagined Vesta when I was 12 years old, except that Mr. Wombo likes to make her hair look like cat legs thanks to the unavoidable and annoying limitations of stable diffusion. 

Retro-SIHA award winner in
2023- "Assignment: Earth".

 Fair Use. And the answer is "no"... the free and always-safe-for-work version of WOMBO Dream did not generate these nipples (above)... I'll call them my pulp science fiction fantasy pasties (source).

  Gary Seven and Isis. I can't stop myself from wondering about the kind of relationship that would exist between a boy like Gary Seven growing up on the planet Zyphyra and his "pet cat", Isis, who can take on any convenient physical form. If there ever is an "Assignment: Earth" television show, it would be fun if during each episode, Isis would morph into a new physical form, allowing her nanite-powered shape-shifting ability to be witnessed by one of the human characters appearing in that episode. 

The other issue is the type of telepathic powers that all of the Zyn have, including Isis. In my imagination, in emergency situations, Isis could occasionally allow Gary Seven to see her morph or otherwise make use of her advanced alien nanotechnology. 

A Zyn helper using a form
of nanite-powered telepathy.

 Prime Directive. In my imagination, it is a requirement of Zyny culture that they never reveal the advance abilities of their Zyn helpers to primitive creatures such as humans, not even Supervisors. The Zyny really want the human colonists who have lived on Zyphyra to deal with the social problems that arise on Earth and not become overly-dependent on too much help from the Zyny. 

 Supervisor 194. Maybe a Zyn like Isis can telepathically erase Gary Seven's memories whenever her "cover" is blown. How might the telepathy of the Zyny and their Zyn work? I favor the use of some sort of technology-assisted telepathy. Maybe the Zyn can send infites into human brains to re-program the Phari endosymbiont and over-ride any biological, cellular memory processes.

Related Viewing: dog people and Picard meets a supervisor
and Related Reading: 2022 SIHA and the Omegans
Jump to the 2024 SIHA

Next: Plans for City on the Edge of Tomorrow.

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