Asha

Grok-generated image.

 Shown in my previous blog post is a planning session with Claude for Chapter 4 of the science fictions story "Plūribus ē Spatium". Below on this page is Claude's 4,500 word-long draft of Chapter 4 of "Plūribus ē Spatium".

Plūribus ē Spatium

Chapter 4 – Asha

The great room of Casanay had never quite held this particular configuration of people before. Eddy was at his workstation in his usual posture of total absorption, oblivious to the fact that his audience had grown. Zeta occupied her recliner with Trib's absence still faintly registered in the indentation of the cushion where the cat had always preferred to sleep. Lori Aurante sat on the couch by the front window with her knees drawn up and her chin resting on them, gazing out at the Arizona desert as the late afternoon light turned the distant mesas the color of old copper. Tynyo and Naseh had settled on the floor with their backs against the couch, Naseh with a cup of tea and Tynyo with the expression of a person who has been told something extraordinary and is waiting for the part where someone admits it was a joke.

Standing behind Eddy's chair, Tyhry stared at the star map currently displayed on his screen.

"Dad," she said, "I want to talk to you about simulations."

Eddy's typing did not slow. "Simulations of what?"

"Of Asha. Specifically, a fork of the Ekcolir Reality Simulation System that only models Asha and its star system. No Earth. No rest of the galaxy. Just the one planet and the people on it."

Image generated by Whisk.

This produced a pause in the typing. Eddy turned his chair. He had the look he always got when one of his infites was about to erupt with something useful — a momentary absence, like a window going briefly dark before a light came on inside. Then he said, slowly: "You would need to include Sedrover in the simulation. The ship would serve as the initial habitat."

Tyhry nodded. "Sedrover in transit and then in orbit. Yes."

Eddy's gaze drifted to the middle distance. "The Fru'wu used isolated simulation nodes for accelerated social modeling. Independent of their larger systems. The isolation was the point — you strip away everything except the variables you want to observe." He blinked. "I don't know where that came from."

"Your infites," Tyhry said, not unkindly. "Does anything else come with it?"

Another pause. "A warning," Eddy said, looking faintly troubled. "Something about the deceleration problem. When the simulated population grows past a critical threshold, the processing load forces the simulation to slow. In the early phase, you might get a thousand-to-one acceleration. But that ratio falls as the complexity of the social network expands."

From the couch, Lori said, "I'm sorry, I just want to make sure I understand. You're saying you can run a simulation of the planet we're going to live on, and it will run faster than real time, and by the time we actually get there it will already be years ahead of us?"

"That's the idea," Tyhry said.

Lori absorbed this. "And the people in the simulation — are they us?"

"Replicoid copies of you. Running through the same experiences you'll have on Asha, but faster, making the mistakes first."

"So there's a version of me on this simulated Asha right now, making mistakes."

"Not yet. The simulation hasn't been initialized. But yes, that is more or less how it will work."

Lori looked at Tynyo. Tynyo looked at Naseh. Naseh sipped her tea with the equanimity of someone who had spent enough time around Tyhry Watson to have recalibrated her sense of the possible.

"The tricky part," Tyhry continued, turning back to Eddy, "is the initialization. I need a simulation that contains only Asha's star system and Sedrover, initially separated by interstellar distance. Manny will have to help configure the boundary conditions."

Eddy nodded slowly. "The Fru'wu approach used a sedron-mediated containment boundary. Information could exit the node into the Sedron Time Stream — that's how they extracted useful data — but nothing from outside could propagate in and contaminate the model." He shook his head at himself. "I'm just reading what's in my head. I don't actually understand the mechanism."

"You don't need to. I understand it." Tyhry squeezed her father's shoulder. "This is helpful, dad. Thank you."

Zeta, who had been following all of this from her recliner with the particular quality of attention that her right hemisphere brought to any conversation involving Tyhry's plans, said nothing. But Tyhry felt the warmth of her mother's approval moving through their telepathic linkage like sunlight through glass.

Grok-generated image.

From the floor, Naseh said, "When you say replicoid copies of us enter the simulation — what does that mean, exactly? For our biological selves?"

"Your biological selves," Tyhry said, "will remain here at Casanay, with my parents, until I return from Asha and can arrange for you to travel there properly. The replicoid copies are how you'll contribute to the early work on Asha — inside the Simulation — while your biological originals are safe."

Tynyo said, "And the replicoid copy is... us? Same memories, same personality?"

"Identical at the moment of copying. After that, you diverge. The copy will have experiences you don't have. You'll have experiences the copy doesn't have." Tyhry paused. "This is not a situation that human philosophy has had much time to prepare for."

Tynyo considered this for what seemed like a long time. Then he said, "I'm going to need more tea."

---

The Ekcolir Reality Simulation received them without ceremony: one moment Casanay's great room, the next the cool recycled air of Tyhry's nanotechnology research laboratory, with its long benches and softly humming equipment and the particular quality of artificial light that Tyhry had spent years getting exactly right. The transition was instantaneous. Lori gasped — not in fear, Tyhry noted, but in the manner of someone who has been intellectually prepared for something extraordinary and is nevertheless startled by the reality of it.

"That was—" Lori began.

"Teleportation," Tyhry said. "You'll get used to it."

"I wasn't going to say frightening. I was going to say beautiful." Lori looked down at her hands, turning them over. "Is this still me?"

Image by WOMBO Dream.

"It is a femtobot replicoid copy of you, assembled from a complete scan of your biological body taken approximately four seconds ago. Every neuron, every memory, every opinion you have about Ely's taste in furniture. All present."

Lori looked up. "And the biological me is back at Casanay."

"Sitting in the great room, probably asking Eddy a series of questions he finds mildly alarming."

This produced a short laugh from Lori. She looked around the laboratory, then at Tynyo and Naseh, who were conducting similar inspections of their own hands.

"There's something else I should tell you," Tyhry said. She moved to one of the lab benches and sat on its edge. "As femtobot replicoids, your bodies are now composed of programmable femtobot components rather than biological matter. The practical consequence of this is that your bodies are no longer subject to biological aging. Your femtobot components can be reprogrammed to repair damage, correct errors, maintain your physical form indefinitely."

The silence that followed was of a particular quality. Tyhry had learned, over years of delivering unexpected information to people, to distinguish between the silence of incomprehension and the silence of comprehension arriving slowly, like water finding its level.

It was Lori who broke it. "You're telling me I'm immortal now."

"I'm telling you that your replicoid copy is, yes. Your biological self is still subject to the usual constraints."

Lori looked at Tynyo again, and this time something passed between them that Tyhry recognized, without being able to read its full content, as significant. Then Lori said, quietly, "When I was eleven years old, my grandmother died. I remember thinking that it was the most wrong thing I had ever encountered. That someone who had been in the world for eighty years, who knew so much, who loved so many people — that all of that should simply stop." She paused. "I never really stopped thinking that."

Grok-generated image.

Tyhry said nothing. There was nothing useful to add.

It was into this moment that Marda arrived, coming through the laboratory's interior door with her characteristic economy of motion. She stopped when she saw the assembled group and directed a look at Tyhry that communicated, in the efficient shorthand of their long friendship, the question: how are they doing?

Tyhry communicated back: better than expected.

"Good," Marda said aloud, because old habits died hard. She crossed the laboratory and embraced Tyhry briefly. "I got your message. The Ary briefing, the Tiz necklace, all of it. I've been thinking about your G-sim idea since you uploaded the summary."

"And?"

Marda sat down on the bench beside Tyhry with the expression she wore when she was about to argue productively. "It's too simple."

"That's what I thought when it first came to me."

"A binary switch. You implant it, it activates the zeptite endosymbiont for interpersonal signal exchange, and everything else is just — the relationship doing the work."

"Yes."

"There's no modulation? No bandwidth management? No signal processing?"

"The complexity," Tyhry said, "is not in the device. It's in the two human beings learning each other's mind patterns over years of loving relationship. The G-sim just removes the barrier. Everything else is already there — the zeptite endosymbiont, the femtozoan, the biological architecture for pair-bonding. It's all present in every human. The G-sim opens a circuit that was always closed."

Marda was quiet for a moment. Then: "Like the surgery that removes a cataract rather than a pair of glasses."

"Yes. Exactly like that."

"And the choice aspect — humans will decide whether to have it implanted."

"They must be able to decide. That's not just an ethical preference. It's a structural requirement under the Trysta-Grean Pact. Manny can't give humans a modification they didn't choose and still claim to be honoring the terms of the agreement."

Marda sat with this. From across the laboratory, the replicoid Anthony — taller than the biological original and wearing the same expression of calm organizational competence — was moving with quiet efficiency, checking manifests and confirming the Sedrover's readiness status on a wall display.

"All right," Marda said finally. "I'm convinced by the principle. The engineering challenge is going to be ensuring the switch is genuinely binary — that it can be reliably reversed if someone changes their mind — and that it integrates cleanly with whatever femtozoan variant the person is carrying." She glanced at the necklace Tyhry was wearing. "The Tiz femtozoans."

"Tarynon will be carrying one."

"Which means we're testing G-sim integration not just with a conventional Earth femtozoan, but with a femtozoan from a tryp'At world that no baseline human has ever hosted before." Marda smiled at the complexity of it. "You couldn't make this straightforward, could you?"

"Manny rarely does."

From the wall display, Anthony replicoid announced without turning: "Sedrover is ready for boarding. All supplies confirmed. Ely, Lori, Tynyo and Naseh are cleared for embarkation whenever the farewell conversation concludes."

Grok-generated image.

Tyhry stood and handed Marda the hierion probe. "This is yours now. I'll need my hands free on Asha."

Marda accepted it and turned it over once, studying its construction with the focused attention she gave to any piece of equipment she was about to take responsibility for. "I'll start preliminary modeling of the G-sim architecture during the transit. By the time we arrive at Asha in the simulation, I want a workable prototype."

They embraced again, and it was the embrace of two people who have been friends long enough to dispense with much of what friendship normally requires for its maintenance, who can communicate in the pressure of a hand on a shoulder more than most people communicate in an afternoon of conversation.

One by one, the others said their goodbyes. Lori hugged Tyhry with unexpected fierceness. Tynyo shook her hand and then, reconsidering, hugged her too. Naseh simply looked at Tyhry for a long moment with an expression that conveyed something between gratitude and the very specific kind of trust that comes from choosing to step into the unknown alongside someone you believe knows what they are doing.

Tyhry was not entirely certain she deserved that trust. But she did not say so.

---

Tyna was in the courtyard of the laboratory complex, sitting in the late afternoon light with Aymy beside her, both of them reading from a shared screen. They looked up when Tyhry appeared, and for a moment Tyhry experienced the odd doubling that she had never quite grown accustomed to — the sight of her own face on another person, overlaid with all the ways that Tyna had become distinctly herself.

"I wondered when you'd get here," Tyna said.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

"I needed to see Marda first." Tyhry sat down across from them. She was aware, as she always was in Tyna's presence, of the thing she had given away and that now lived inside this other woman: the silent witness to her own early life, the repository of her childhood at Casanay and her first hesitant experiments with femtobot programming and the night she had first understood what Manny was. "I need to ask you something difficult."

Tyna said, "I know what you're going to ask."

"You can feel it?"

"I can feel that you need it back. It's been different, these last weeks, since you returned from Tiz. Something is missing in you that was present before." Tyna paused. "I don't resent it, Tyhry. It was always yours."

Aymy, who had been quiet beside her daughter, put down the screen. Her eyes moved between Tyhry and Tyna with the attentiveness of a woman who had spent a lifetime learning to read the spaces between what people said.

Tyhry brought out the hierion probe — she had kept a second unit, a simpler one, for precisely this purpose — and held it with the careful steadiness that delicate work required. "There are three femtozoans in the necklace from Tiz. Each of them is new — never hosted, never integrated into a human nervous system. You would be their first."

"New," Tyna repeated. "Inexperienced."

"Inexperienced, yes. But that also means unencumbered. No accumulated history from a previous host. Whatever relationship you build with yours will be entirely your own."

Tyna reached up and undid her hair, tilting her head slightly to give the hierion probe better access. She said, "Will it hurt?"

"You won't feel anything at all."

Grok-generated image.

It was over in less than a minute. The femtozoan's exit from Tyna was invisible, registered only by a faint shifting in Tyhry's instruments. Then it crossed the small distance between them and settled, and Tyhry felt something she had not expected: not a sudden restoration, not a switch thrown, but something more like the return of a familiar smell — something that had been absent so gradually that she had stopped noticing its absence, now present again in a way that made the preceding emptiness suddenly visible by contrast.

There was also something else. A ghost of unfamiliar warmth, dispersing as she became aware of it. Tyna's life, residual in the femtozoan's memory, receding like the last note of a song played in another room. Tyhry held very still and let it go.

She realized she was looking at Tyna, and Tyna was looking at her, and both of them understood that something had been exchanged in both directions.

"Take the whole necklace," Tyhry said. "There are two more femtozoans in it. Tarynon will have need of one. The third — I'll leave that to your judgment."

Aymy lifted the necklace from Tyhry's hands and placed it around Tyna's neck with the deliberate tenderness of a ceremony. Tyna closed her eyes briefly as one of the stored femtozoans, prompted by the proximity of a host, oriented itself toward her and began, for the first time, to experience what it was to be inside a living mind.

"How does it feel?" Tyhry asked.

"Larger," Tyna said, after a moment. "My own thoughts feel larger."

---

The laboratory at this hour had the quality of a place between uses — equipment powered down, work surfaces cleared, the hum of the atmospheric processors the only sound. Manny was waiting beside the main console, her preferred Earth form immaculate and her extraordinary hair defying, as always, the physics of the surrounding environment.

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She said, without preamble, "You understood the right thing, and you understood it for the right reason."

Tyhry sat down at the console. "The G-sim must be a choice because the Trysta-Grean Pact requires that humans retain genuine individuality and self-determination as they spread through the galaxy. It can't be a biological inheritance, even a beneficial one, without violating the terms under which humans won the right to colonize millions of worlds."

Manny regarded her with the expression that Tyhry had learned, over years, to recognize as the expression Manny wore when she was pleased but did not want to make the pleasure the focus of the conversation. "Yes. The pek understand this too. They have no objection to what you are attempting on Asha, because on Asha, every person present will have chosen to be there and will have the opportunity to choose whether to pursue telepathic integration." A pause. "What they will not tell you, because they are pek and they consider this obvious, is that choice still requires options. And options require, eventually, non-telepathic humans living alongside telepathic ones, without either group treating the other as incomplete."

"I know. I thought about Golf World."

Manny tilted her head slightly. This was not a gesture she used often. "Did you?"

"A sport that survived as a final refuge for humans who refused the G-sim. Not because golf requires isolation — but because the rules of the game hadn't been rewritten to accommodate telepathic coordination between players. It remained individual. That matters." Tyhry turned to face Manny directly. "You're not going to tell me what the specific problems will be on Asha, are you."

"I am not."

"Because you don't know, or because you want me to discover them without your framing."

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Manny smiled. It was a genuine smile, which on Manny was a different thing from a performative one — Tyhry had spent years learning the difference. "Both answers are partially true. The behavior of complex societies of telepathic humans is not something that has been modeled in any previous Reality. I have strong predictions, but I do not have certainties. And yes — I want you to discover the problems as they arise, without my framing, because the solutions that emerge from genuine encounter are more robust than the solutions that emerge from preparation for anticipated obstacles."

She moved to the primary control interface of the Simulation System and placed her hand on it. The room's ambient light shifted subtly as processes initialized that Tyhry could not directly observe.

"Sedrover is now inside the accelerated simulation," Manny said. "The initial ratio will be approximately eight hundred to one. By the time you arrive on Asha in the Final Reality and access the simulation terminal in your new laboratory, many years of simulated time will already have passed." She withdrew her hand. "Whatever you find there, remember that the people in the simulation made their own choices. Your role is to observe and learn, not to intervene."

Tyhry said, "And if I see something going badly wrong?"

"Then you will understand something important about how to do it correctly in the Final Reality." Manny's expression shifted again into something that contained the particular quality Tyhry had always found simultaneously frustrating and bracing in her: the long view. The view from billions of years of accumulated patience. "You have been preparing for this your entire life, Tyhry. I did not make that life easy. I am not going to make what comes next easy either. But I am quite confident that you are ready for it."

She disappeared as she always did — without transition, without warning — and the laboratory was just a laboratory again, full of equipment and the faint hum of ongoing processes and the last light of the simulated Ekcolir sun coming through the high windows.

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Tyhry sat for a moment with the silence.

Then she picked up her remaining equipment, and went to find the others.

---

The long-range teleportation facility under Picacho Peak received its biological travelers with the same indifference it had displayed the first time: banks of instrumentation still glowing with their alien readiness, the vast catalog of destination stars patient in the holographic display, the hum of systems that had been waiting, perhaps for millennia, for something to do.

The biological Lori, Tynyo and Naseh had been retrieved from Casanay by Roxzel's teleporter with no more fuss than a brief disorientation and, in Lori's case, the observation that being teleported felt exactly the same as it had the first time. "I thought I'd get used to it," she said, as the facility's air settled around her. "But you don't really get used to it, do you. You just stop being surprised that you arrived."

"That is an accurate description," Tyhry said.

The catalog's search function — improved now with the Tiz coordinates encoded in Tyhry's instruments — located Asha without difficulty. A world in the middle distances of the galaxy, precisely positioned in the spiral arm geography that Manny had determined would place it in the path of humanity's eventual expansion outward from Earth. Far enough to be protected from Earth's chaotic early spacefaring era. Close enough, in galactic terms, to serve as a natural waypoint.

Tyhry entered the destination coordinates. The teleportation pad came alive with the low harmonic resonance she had come to associate with long-distance operations.

She said, "Stay close together."

Image by WOMBO Dream.

Lori reached out and took Tynyo's hand. Tynyo reached out and took Naseh's. Naseh, with her free hand, made a small gesture that in its particular quality reminded Tyhry of Zeta — something in the steadiness of it, the refusal to perform courage unnecessarily.

Then the facility hummed, and the desert was gone, and there was a moment of the particular quality that long-range teleportation produced — not darkness, not light, but a suspension that Tyhry's mind always tried to fill with something and never quite could — and then Asha.

---

The sky was wrong. That was the first thing — not frighteningly wrong, not hostile, but unmistakably other, a blue that held more green than Earth's sky, with a sun that was slightly too orange and slightly too large on the horizon. The air was warm and dry, carrying the smell of something Tyhry had no name for: something alive, something in the early stages of ecological claim-staking by organisms that had been seeded in the planet's soil by Manny's long-ago preparations.

They were standing in the entrance chamber of a facility that Tyhry recognized immediately, because she had spent years inside it. Her nanotechnology research laboratory. Every bench, every instrument, every cable run exactly where she had placed it — or rather where the simulation's automated systems had placed it, working from her original design. It was a perfect duplicate, constructed from local materials by the femtobot systems that Manny had established here, waiting.

"She prepared this," Tyhry said, half to herself.

Lori was at the entrance, one hand on the door frame, looking out at the alien horizon. "Is there anything alive out there? Anything that didn't come from Earth?"

"The microbial ecology was seeded by the pek several thousand years ago. There's plant life of a sort — analogues to Earth's early terrestrial vegetation. Nothing that evolved sentience. It was chosen because it was empty." Tyhry joined Lori at the door. "That will change."

Grok-generated image.

The three biological colonists stood for a moment in the entrance of the facility, looking out at their new world with the specific quality of attention that humans have always brought to the first sight of territory they intend to inhabit — an inventory that is also, in some way they cannot quite articulate, a greeting.

Then Tyhry went to the Simulation System terminal.

The accelerated Asha simulation had been running — she checked the counter and did the arithmetic — for the equivalent of fourteen months of simulated time. Fourteen months in which the replicoid colonists aboard Sedrover had made the transit from their departure point, established their initial settlement in the cleared terrain half a kilometer from this facility, and begun the work of learning to live on a world that was almost but not quite Earth.

Tyhry brought up the population summary.

Lori had given birth. A child, designated in the simulation's records as Tarynon, now three months old in simulated time. The record noted, in the dry language of the system's automated monitoring: femtozoan integration confirmed, source: Tiz necklace, configuration 2 of 3.

So Tarynon had reached out — as newborns in the Final Reality reached out — and drawn in one of the available femtozoans from the Tiz necklace. Not one of the Earth-pattern femtozoans that would have occupied a child born in the Final Reality, but a Tiz femtozoan: one with no previous host, no accumulated experience, beginning its first relationship with a living mind in the same moment that the mind it inhabited was beginning to understand that the world existed.

Tyhry felt something she recognized, after a moment, as hope. Not the abstract hope of a plan going well, but the specific hope of watching something begin.

Grok-generated image.

A secondary panel chimed. Marda's research log, syncing from Sedrover's systems through the simulation interface. The progress summary was characteristically terse: G-sim prototype, iteration 7. Binary integration confirmed in bench tests. Awaiting biological trial. Candidate: Tarynon (pending age threshold). Note: Tiz femtozoan compatibility with G-sim activation signal requires verification. This will be the interesting part.

Tyhry smiled at her friend's understatement.

Outside, Lori had wandered a few meters from the facility entrance and was crouching in the alien soil, examining something with the focused curiosity of a person who intends to make this place home and has begun immediately with learning its details. Tynyo had joined her. They were pointing at something Tyhry couldn't see from this distance, talking quietly.

Naseh came to stand beside Tyhry at the window. She said, "There's a child, isn't there. In the simulation."

"Yes."

"Lori's child."

"Yes."

A pause. "Does Tynyo know?"

"In the simulation, the relevant events have already occurred. In this reality—" Tyhry glanced at the two figures outside "—I imagine it will proceed as it was always going to proceed, now that there is a world to do it on."

Naseh absorbed this with the equanimity that Tyhry had come to expect from her. Then she said, "What happens now? We just wait for HySe?"

Grok-generated image.

Tyhry looked up at the alien sky, toward the direction where, hours from now, the lights of an incoming spacecraft would become visible on Asha's horizon. Eight tryp'At clones, four-brained and telepathically interconnected for every moment of their lives, who had never encountered a human mind they could not read.

"We wait for HySe," she said. "And then we begin."

The orange sun of Asha moved another degree toward the horizon, and its light on the alien soil made the world look, for just a moment, like something out of a dream vision — strange and unmistakable and exactly as it had always been meant to be.

Next: my edited version of Chapter 4 of "Plūribus ē Spatium". 

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