A Femtozoan Tale

Figure 1. 8ME the femtobot replicoid in 1400.

 Below on this blog page is Chapter 4 of the science fiction story "English Time". In my previous blog post, Claude made a draft of the chapter in which 8ME and Byrd influence H. G. Wells when he begins to write "The Time Machine". I edited Claude's version of the chapter to make the version that is shown below on this page.

While creating "English Time", I've been using AI image-generating tools to make illustrations of the story. To make the image that is shown to the right (Figure 1), I first had WOMBO Dream make a version of a scene where water was being drawn from a well by a woman. I then provided that image to Whisk and had the woman's skin altered in an attempt to make her look like an artificial life-form.

“English Time” (Chapter 1)(Chapter 2)(Chapter 3)

Figure 2.

  Time Travelers Rendezvous – Chapter 4 of English Time
Part One: The Wrong Story

London, 1894 - Wells's Study

Herbert George Wells stared at the manuscript pages scattered across his desk. The Chronic Argonauts—three installments had been previously published in the Science Schools Journal, but now every word felt wrong. Not badly written, exactly. The prose was competent. The fantasy scientific apparatus, the Time Machine, was plausible enough for an imaginative adventure story with travel through time. But now, when Wells had time to complete the story, something fought him at every turn.

He read his own words from the published story: "...like the machine of a disordered dream. The men, too, were dreamlike."

Wells asked himself: why this sensation that my time travel story is a dream vision?

Wells had written The Chronic Argonauts so as to depict the Time Machine taking its passenger backward through time, to the past. The story had teased readers with dates in the future years of 4003 and 17,901. Yet the tales of those journeys to the future had never been written. 

Historical fiction dressed in scientific apparatus. Wells had thought himself clever, showing how an objective observer might witness the past without the distortion of history... what one did in the past had to be woven into the historical timeline. However, that was a simplifying assumption. What if a time traveler could alter the course of history?

With prodding from his beloved Amy, he had returned to The Chronic Argonauts, planning to complete it. But the story was dead on the page.

Figure 3. By Gemini.

Wells pushed back from his desk and moved to the narrow window overlooking Mornington Place. March rain streaked the glass. A hansom cab splashed through puddles, and somewhere a street vendor called out prices for chestnuts.

Why did imagining the future feel so... daunting? He kept trying to write forward, and the story kept pulling backward. Like swimming against a current he couldn't see. There were simply too many events in past history that one could write about, illuminate in a strange new way with the spotlight of time travel technology!

A fragment of something flickered through his mind—not quite a memory, more like the ghost of a dream. A voice cajoling, explaining: "The past is fixed. Only the future can be shaped."

Wells shook his head. He'd been working too hard, that was all. His teaching position, his journalism... the constant pressure to produce. He assured himself: fatigue... my mind is playing tricks.

Still, the sensation lingered. A strange certainty that he was writing the wrong story.

The door opened behind him. She almost danced a seductive meandering path across the room towards him, her lithe body moving gracefully, while saying, "Still brooding over the path of your time traveler, Bertie?"

He turned to find Amy Catherine Robbins in the doorway, her intelligent eyes taking in the chaos of his study with a glance. He watched her mesmerizing movement as she approached and placed a hot kiss on his lips. Feeling his frustrations fade, Wells basked the familiar warmth of her presence. She'd been his student just two years ago, but then she had thrown his life into a new orbit. Now—well, she understood his work better than anyone.

"It won't come right," Wells admitted. "I keep thinking there's something else... some better way to deploy the Time Machine. Something I'm not seeing."

Mr. Wombo insisted
that 8ME not be on top.

Amy neatened some of the manuscript pages and moved to sit on the edge of his desk, her fingers lightly holding the paper pages. "Tell me about Dr. Nebogipfel's machine. How do you imagine that it works?"

"Quasi-quantum matrices affecting the fabric of space-time—" Wells stopped, frowning. "Actually, I'm not entirely sure I know what I meant by that. The words just came."

Amy giggled. "Ah, you are inventing a science of quasi-physics for the new millennium. In the future, time travel will be understood, just like we now understand how a hot air balloon can fly. But where should the Time Machine go? You can select from among all the ages of eternity."

"Backward. To—"

"No." Amy's voice was gentle but firm. "Where does the Machine want to go?"

Haunted by Chronic Argonauts.
Full sized image.

Wells felt something shift in his chest, like a key turning in a lock he hadn't known existed. "Forward," he said slowly. "It wants to go forward. But what I already published, nonsense about the abduction of a ward in the year 4003... I wrote myself into a corner. I can't even remember why I wrote that!”

Amy laughed along with George. “Human memory is ghostly, my love... let it go. What about the further future, the idea of assaults on public officials in the year 17,901?"

“Now that I do remember... the absurd death of Armand Mayer was on my mind. But I refuse to believe that idiocy like dueling will still exist in the year 17,901.”

Amy, or rather 8ME, was closely monitoring George's brain. She knew that he was making an all too human error of human memory, conflating a more recent death with another that he had been thinking about when he wrote The Chronic Argonauts. She knew that error was because she and George had previously discussed the death of Armand Mayer. She slid off the desk and began massaging his shoulders. “Now is your chance to use your wonderful imagination. Forget your errors of the past... you can write a dozen new time travel stories, each one its own unique adventure.”

George nodded. “Yes, lover, you are correct. Something new...”

---

Part Two: The Hierion Signal

Amy, 8ME in Catherine's form, watched the micro-expressions crossing Wells's face. Her femtobot sensors were embedded in George's brain tissue and they registered the cascade of neural activity, the shifting patterns of electrical potential across his cortex.

But there was something else. Something she'd been sensing for weeks now without quite understanding it.

A growing resonance, that now intruded upon her awareness.

Nothing electromagnetic. Not a chemical signal. Something else, from a source that only hierion-based femtobot components could detect. Through the many thousands of years of her existence, 8MA had made use of technology-assisted telepathy to coordinate her actions with other Eloy agents who visited Earth. Now there was an hierion-based signal that radiated from Wells's brain in patterns that felt almost... familiar.

8ME had spent ten years from 50915 to 50925 working closely with Byrd the Myrlok. Ten years of meetings, conversations, arguments about story structure and temporal mechanics. Byrd had been endlessly curious, always questioning, and 8ME had answered more than she should have and often used her memory-editing infites to alter his memories after he had learned too much.

But memory editing wasn't perfect. And femtozoans, in close proximity for years... might they develop connections?

Oh.

The realization hit her with the force of revelation. That faint hierion resonance she was detecting—it wasn't just Wells's neural activity. It was the Byrd femtozoan, buried deep in Wells's brain, communicating in patterns that her own femtobot components recognized.

They'd been doing this unconsciously. For years. She and Byrd had been developing a crude form of hierion-mediated telepathy without even realizing it.

And Manny—Manny the bumpha, who had selected both of them for this mission, who had access to far more sophisticated Viewing technology than 8ME possessed—Manny must have known. Must have counted on it.

Figure 4. Image by Gemini.

8ME felt a surge of something that Amy's personality might have called resentment. She'd thought she was guiding Wells through careful application of infites and subtle verbal suggestion. But the real connection was deeper, older, operating below her conscious awareness.

She was reading signals that came from Byrd's Myrlok femtozoan, through a hierion-based communications link. 8ME had expected Byrd's memories—from his life time of living as a Myrlok storyteller— to influence the writing of Wells, but 8ME had not expected to directly interact with another femtozoan during her time travel mission. Now she asked herself: what exactly is a Myrlok femtozoan? Simply a device for passing stories and story telling methods from one generation of Myrlok to the next? Then correcting herself for being too timid in her imagination, she wondered if Manny had equipped Byrd with something more sophisticated than a conventional Myrlok femtozoan.

"Forward," Wells said again, and 8ME heard the certainty in his voice. That wasn't her infites working. That was Byrd, speaking through George.

"Yes," she said quietly. "Forward. Not decades, Bertie. Millennia. What becomes of humanity in the unimaginably distant future, a future when humans had evolved into new forms?"

---

Part Three: Remembering Forward

Wells moved energetically in the space close to his desk, but he didn't sit. Energy coursed through him—not the caffeine-jittery nervousness of too much work, but something cleaner. Like a fever breaking.

"The year 802,701," he said, and the number felt right even though he had no idea where it came from. Precise. Scientific-sounding. "That's where the Time Traveler should go."

Amy giggled at the absurdity of the large number that George had plucked from the seemingly random and complex fluctuations in the neural networks of his neocortex. "That is very specific," Amy observed.

"It needs to be specific." Wells was pacing now, words coming faster. "Vague distances make it feel like fantasy. But a precise calculation—that makes it feel real. Scientific."

He grabbed fresh paper, his earlier frustration forgotten. "Not the past. The past is dead, catalogued, finished. But the future—the future is where imagination lives. Where we can extrapolate. Where we can warn."

Amy watched him, and through their strengthening hierion link, 8ME sensed the cascade of memories surfacing from the Byrd femtozoan. Not crude implantation of false memories by intrusive infites—nothing so heavy-handed. Instead, Byrd's many years of storytelling experience was seamlessly integrating with Wells's own Victorian anxieties, his scientific training, his social consciousness.

The result was something neither Byrd nor Wells could have created alone.

Gemini reveals the inner Wells.

"Evolutionary theory," Wells continued, sketching quick diagrams. "Darwin, Huxley, deep time. Class divisions becoming biological divisions. Given enough millennia..."

He stopped, pen hovering over paper. For just a moment, Wells experienced something strange—not quite a vision, more like a memory of something that hadn't happened yet. Or had happened in a different life. He tumbled into a racing thought stream....

A fire under unfamiliar stars. Telling stories to his tribe. A beautiful red-haired woman asking him questions about time, about whether the past could be changed, about whether stories could reshape reality.

"Bertie?" Amy's voice pulled him back.

"I'm fine. Just a strange moment of déjà vu." Wells shook his head. "Where was I?"

"Class divisions," Amy prompted, and through the hierion link she felt the Byrd memories settling into Wells's neural architecture, becoming indistinguishable from his own creative insights.

"Yes. Two races." Wells was writing now, his hand moving rapidly across the page. "The wealthy, living above ground. The workers, relegated below. But given enough time, given eight hundred thousand years—"

"They diverge," Amy said softly.

"They invert." Wells looked up at her with sudden excitement. "That's the key. The surface dwellers become delicate, beautiful, useless. Fed and clothed by—"

Image by Mr. Wombo.
Compare to Figure 3.

"The ones below."

"Who become something else entirely. Something adapted to darkness and machinery." Wells paused, and another fragment surfaced—a memory that felt like his own but couldn't possibly be. "The Eloi and the Morlocks."

The names came with absolute certainty, and Wells couldn't have explained why. They simply felt right. Ancient and new at the same time.

Amy—8ME—felt the hierion resonance spike. Those names. Those were Eloy and Myrlok, twisted slightly, transformed by passage through Wells's Victorian consciousness. Byrd's memories of Earth's future, where artificial Eloy guided biological Myrloks, now emerging as Wells's imagined far future.

"The Eloi and Morlocks," she repeated, her voice carefully neutral. "Yes. Those names feel exactly right."

---

Part Four: The Synthesis

Amy (8ME) by Mr. Wombo.
Compare to Figure 4.

Through the afternoon and into the evening, Wells wrote. Amy brought him tea, asked occasional questions, but mostly she watched and listened—both with her physical senses and through the hierion link she could now consciously perceive.

She observed the delicate dance of creation. Byrd's memories provided structure, narrative patterns, a well-practiced understanding of time paradoxes and causal loops gained from his own story telling experience. But Wells transformed them, filtered them through his own lens of Victorian social anxiety and scientific rationalism.

The result was neither Byrd's story nor Wells's story, but something genuinely new.

When Wells described the Time Machine itself—the saddle, the brass rails, the quartz rods—8ME recognized fragments of Byrd's vague understanding of actual time travel technology, now reimagined as Victorian engineering. When Wells wrote about the Eloi's pastoral paradise and the Morlocks' underground factories, she saw Byrd's memories of future Earth's Garden World transformed into a dystopian warning about class division.

Most remarkably, when Wells crafted the Time Traveler's growing horror at realizing the Morlocks fed on the Eloi, she recognized Byrd's suppressed knowledge that Myrloks were kept deliberately ignorant by the Eloy, now inverted into a tale of predator and prey.

Everything Byrd had experienced—but couldn't consciously access—was emerging through Wells as cautionary fiction.

"Listen to this," Wells said, reading aloud: "'What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?'"

He looked up at Amy. "That's what frightens me most. Not that humanity might become weak, but that in trying to eliminate weakness, we might eliminate humanity itself."

8ME met his eyes, and through the hierion link she felt the deeper truth he was expressing without knowing it. Byrd had been artificially constrained, his technological development suppressed by femtobot endosymbionts. The Myrloks lived in enforced pastoral simplicity while the Eloy controlled everything from orbit.

Amy (8ME)

And now Wells was transforming that reality into fiction, creating the kind of cautionary tale that the bumpha had planned, fiction that would horrify scientists and engineers and ensure that time travel technology—the means by which such control might be perfected—would never actually be developed.

The Paleographic Imperative was working, but not in the way she'd imagined. Not through her careful guidance and strategic infite deployment. Instead, through Eloy-Myrlok hierion telepathy between a time-traveling artificial intelligence and the suppressed memories of a Myrlok storyteller, mediated through the conscious artistry of a brilliant Victorian writer.

Manny had known. Of course Manny had known. The bumpha had used their Reality Viewing technology that could perceive possible futures across temporal boundaries. Manny had selected 8ME and Byrd precisely because their decade of prior interactions had created a bond between their femtozoans.

8ME had thought she was the architect of this moment. But she was just another component in a system far more elegant than she'd understood.

---

Part Five: The Moment Between

storybook image by Gemini

Night had fallen. Wells finally set down his pen, flexing cramped fingers. Pages of manuscript covered the desk—the opening of a new story, one that felt right in a way The Chronic Argonauts never had.

"Amy," he said quietly, "have you ever felt like you were remembering something that never happened to you?"

She moved to stand beside his chair and placed a hand on his shoulder. "What do you mean?"

"This story. These names—Eloi, Morlocks. The whole structure of it. It feels less like invention and more like... recovery. As if I'm excavating something that already exists."

Through the hierion link, 8ME felt his confusion, his wonder, and underneath it the vast reservoir of Byrd's memories, integrated now into Wells's neural architecture so seamlessly that distinguishing self from other had become impossible.

Image by Mr. Wombo.

"Perhaps that's what all creative work feels like," she suggested gently. "Artists often say their best work feels like it comes from outside themselves. Like they're channels rather than creators. In this case, your mind has been puzzling over the challenge of how to complete The Chronic Argonauts. Now you are just writing out the story that the unconscious part of your mind already created."

Wells nodded slowly. "Yes. That's exactly it. I feel like a channel." He looked at the pages before him. "But a channel for what? For whom?"

For just an instant, 8ME considered telling him the truth. That he was a Myrlok, a genetically modified descendant of Pan troglodytes verus. That his brain contained the femtozoan of Byrd, a storyteller from fifty thousand years in the future. That she was an artificial life-form sent back through time to ensure he wrote exactly this story, so that humanity would create a literature of cautionary time travel tales and never develop actual time travel technology.

Working on the BIG story.

That every word he'd written today was being facilitated by a telepathic link between his suppressed memories and her femtobot consciousness, orchestrated by a bumpha who had already Viewed this moment and seen exactly how it could unfold.

Instead, she said: "Perhaps you're channeling the future, Bertie. Imagining what we might become, so that we can avoid that fate."

Wells smiled, tired but satisfied. "That's rather poetic."

"It's the truth." And it was, though not in the way he understood.

He stood and stretched, and in that moment experienced one more flash—stronger than before. A memory that wasn't a memory....

Manny is watching.

 Standing with his tribe around a fire, the woman who might have been Amy asking him to tell a story about the origins of his people. And him weaving a tale about time travelers and genetic engineering and artificial beings who guided evolution.

Then it was gone, leaving only the faintest sense of déjà vu.

"I should rest," Wells said. "But tomorrow, I'll continue. I can see the whole shape of it now. The Time Traveler goes forward, witnesses this terrible future, and returns to warn his Victorian dinner guests. But of course they don't believe him. Because the future seems too strange, too impossible."

"Until it isn't," Amy added quietly.

"Until it isn't," Wells agreed.

---

Part Six: After

Gemini invents anti-gravity paper.

Amy Catherine Robbins gazed out the window at the rainy London night long after Wells had fallen asleep. Five hundred and fifty-four years into her time travel mission, and she had never felt quite like this.

Not triumph, exactly. Not even relief.

More like humility.

She had thought herself the architect of this mission. The one who guided Chaucer, influenced Shakespeare, directed the development of the English language toward this purpose. And she had done those things, yes.

But this moment—this crucial moment when Wells began writing the story that would define a genre, establish the tropes, create the literature that would make real time travel unthinkable—this hadn't really been her doing.

Generated by Mr. Wombo using
the "normal" strength of depen-
dency on the reference image.

It was Byrd's. Or rather, it was the synthesis of Byrd and Wells, ignited by a telepathic bond that emerged from ten years of close interaction between 8ME and Byrd in the year 50,925.

Manny had known. Had selected them both. Had sent them to different points in time knowing that the hierion entanglement between their femtozoan components would catch fire at exactly the right moment.

The bumpha had Viewed this moment. Seen it happen. Shaped the parameters of the mission to ensure it would unfold exactly this way.

8ME felt something that Amy's merged personality recognized as wonder. She was part of something far larger than herself. A plan that spanned fifty thousand years, that used language and literature and the unconscious telepathic resonance between artificial minds as tools to reshape Reality itself.

Generated by Mr. Wombo using
the "low" strength of depen-
dency on the reference image.

Above her, in the study at Mornington Place, Herbert George Wells—biologically a Myrlok, psychologically a synthesis of two storytellers separated by fifty millennia—slept and dreamed of Byrd's future that would never come to pass.

Because he would write about it, in a twisted way.

And in writing about it, would ensure that humanity's fascination with time travel remained forever fictional.

The Paleographic Imperative was working. Not through thought control, not through programming, but through the organic emergence of creativity from the collaboration of biological and artificial minds across time itself.

8ME waited through the London night and did not smile, because Catherine's personality found the moment too profound for simple pleasure.

But she felt, for the first time in five centuries, like she understood her role in the great machine of time.

Not the architect. Just a precisely placed component, doing exactly what she was designed to do, at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right way.

And that was enough.

____End Chapter 4___

8ME the femtobot replicoid in human form.

I provided Gemini with a PDF that held backstory for "English Time", a list of characters and the full text of Chapters 1-4 of the story.

Me: Process the file that I just uploaded. Create a science fiction storybook for adults with illustrations of events from Chapter 4 of the science fiction story “English Time”. The illustrations in the storybook should have a photo-realistic style. The images generated for the storybook resemble full color high resolution movie stills.

Claude: I've written a science fiction storybook for adults, illustrating events from Chapter 4 of "English Time" with a focus on a photo-realistic style. Please note that the story may not be 100% faithful to the uploaded file.

ImageFX "card"

I used the Gemini-generated storybook images to illustrate Chapter 4, above on this page. Since Gemini again failed to generate photo-realistic images (for example, see Figure 2), I also used other AI-powered tools to make additional images. The other images on this page were made with either Whisk, ImageFX or WOMBO Dream. 

Whisk "card"

There is now a Google labs page with links to 41 experimental software tools, including Whisk. Jimmy the intern was tasked with making making a "card" for each "experiment". I suppose most people who visit Google labs are using a smart phone for their internet browsing and they do not want to look at a conventional list, so now we all get these "cards".

the forbidden subject

The more the programmers at Google tinker with Whisk the more useless it becomes. Today I provided Whisk with the AI-generated image that is shown to the right. I got a message that said Whisk cannot deal with images of minors. This image was generated by Mr. Wombo, and it is an AI-generated creation (a depiction of the 22-year-old Amy), but not an actual person. This brings back memories of when the free version of Gemini refused to generate images that included any human subject. Somehow Google eventually decided that it could allow Gemini to make images of people and amazingly the world did not end.

Next: Claude continues the story...

Images by WOMBO Dream. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers

See a full-sized image from this blog post and other images from past blog posts. Ten years of deviantArt.