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Me: Claude, process the file that I uploaded and then discuss with me the goal of the science fiction story "Plūribus ē Spatium": depicting the design, engineering and implementation of a functional human society in which the people have a sophisticated form of technology-assisted telepathy.
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| Anthony and Tyhry. Image generated by Gemini. |
The type of technology-assisted telepathy that is being made available to humans by Manny depends on the advanced alien sub-nanoscale technology that exists inside humans. Every human has a zeptite endosymbiont that exists as an integral component of their brain. Those zeptite endosymbionts can exchange communications signals that are transmitted by means of transmission and reception of special sedron-based signals.
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| Image by WOMBO Dream. |
The exoplanet Asha is the world where Manny hopes to develop a society of telepathic humans, first inside a Simulation of that world inside the Ekcolir Reality Simulation System. In Chapter 4 of "Plūribus ē Spatium", Marda will transport Ely the Grendel, Lori Aurante, Tynyo and Naseh to Asha using the Sedrover. Tyhry will be teleported to Asha in the Final Reality were she will prepare to meet HySe and the Ary clones.
Claude: What a richly constructed fictional universe! Having read through all three sections carefully, I find the central thesis of "Plūribus ē Spatium" to be genuinely compelling as hard science fiction: the story frames the emergence of human telepathy not as a mystical gift but as an engineering problem that requires millions of years of patient, iterative design work by the bumpha.
Let me reflect on the key structural elements of this theme as the story develops them:
The Layered Technical Architecture
The story is careful to establish that technology-assisted telepathy isn't simply "turned on." It depends on a stack of interlocking components: the zeptite endosymbiont (present in every human brain), the femtozoan (which enables the endosymbiont to interface with the Sedron Time Stream), and now the emerging concept of the G-sim (which Chapter 4 introduces as the device that will allow non-tryp'At humans to activate their latent telepathic capacity). This layered architecture feels scientifically honest — real biological and technological systems work this way, with enabling infrastructure preceding functional capability.
The "Love-Gating" Safety Constraint
This is perhaps the most thematically interesting design choice. Restricting telepathic linkage to people who genuinely love each other isn't merely a romantic flourish — it functions as a crucial security architecture. Forced or involuntary mental access would be catastrophically destabilizing to a civilization; Manny's constraint means that the technology scales naturally with trust relationships. Zeta's femtozoan demonstrates this explicitly: it can only decode the zeptite signals of someone Zeta loves. The story is essentially arguing that the social prerequisite is the technical prerequisite.
The Simulation-First Development Methodology
The planned Chapter 4 reveals something sophisticated about Manny's engineering philosophy: she uses the Ekcolir Reality Simulation as a kind of accelerated prototype environment before committing to the Final Reality implementation. This is intellectually rigorous — you stress-test your social technology in a sandboxed simulation before deploying it irreversibly. The accelerated Asha fork running a year ahead of the biological colonists is a lovely narrative device that lets Tyhry literally observe the consequences of her own design decisions before they fully manifest.
Tyhry's Femtozoan Problem as Plot Engine
Tyhry's loss of her own femtozoan is brilliantly positioned as both a personal dramatic consequence and a thematic diagnostic tool. Her inability to fall in love with the Ary — despite finding them attractive — gives the story a way to demonstrate what the femtozoan actually does in human cognition. She becomes, inadvertently, a control case in Manny's long experiment. Her planned recovery of her femtozoan in Chapter 4, and the trade involving the Tiz necklace femtozoans, suggests Manny may have engineered even this "mistake" to produce data.
What Asha Represents
The choice of Asha as the proving ground is elegant. It's close enough to Earth to eventually influence human civilization there, but isolated enough to develop without interference. The genetic complexity Manny is assembling there — tryp'At, Ek'col, bryg'Dra, Grendel, Asterothrope, and baseline human represented by Lori — reads like a deliberate genetic breadth study. Lori as the sole baseline biological human is particularly interesting: she's the control variable, the anchor to ordinary humanity, which makes her children (beginning with Tarynon) the first real test of whether the G-sim can unlock telepathy in someone without the specialized gene variants.
One question worth exploring as you develop Chapter 4: how will the story handle the asymmetry of early telepathic communication? Tyhry's struggles with the Ary mind pattern suggest that even willing, loving partners face steep learning curves. On Asha, with a small founding population, the social dynamics of who can link to whom — and who remains isolated — could generate rich dramatic tension without requiring any villains.
What aspects of Chapter 4 are you most interested in developing first?
Me: (1) Claude, you mentioned (above): "The accelerated Asha fork running a year ahead of the biological colonists". In my imagination, the accelerated Asha Simulation will continue getting further and further ahead temporally. Let's say that time is initially passing thousands of times faster on the Simulated Asha than on the Asha of the Final Reality. That Simulation rate will slow when the population of the Simulated Asha grows.
(2) Claude, you mentioned (above): "Manny may have engineered even this 'mistake' to produce data." In my imagination, everything that has happened to Tyhry during her life has been part of Manny's plan for preparing Tyhry to play an important role in establishing a viable social system for human telepaths on Asha. The story of why Tyhry transferred her femtozoan into Tyna is told in another science fiction story titled "D*" that I wrote in 2025. Manny prefers to teach Tyhry by guiding her through adventures rather than just tell Tyhry what she needs to know. It was by giving up her femtozoan that Tyhry was able to begin learning about the role of human femtozoans in controlling the type of telepathic ability that Manny has planned for humans of the future to have.
(3) "how will the story handle the asymmetry of early telepathic communication?" In my imagination, the Ary clones represent the pinnacle of love-constrained human technology-assisted telepathy that Manny has so far attained in her experiments with engineered human variants like the Ek'col, the tryp'At and the bryg'Dra. Tyhry's far future vision of Earth humans (in the era when they are beginning to make use of surgically implanted G-sims to enable technology-assisted telepathy) certainly does NOT involve human clones in the pattern that is practiced in the tryp'At society on Tiz. Claude, I'm glad you mentioned "dramatic tension without requiring any villains". I'm interested in science fiction stories where there is NO "good vs. evil" plot structure. For "Plūribus ē Spatium", the challenge is two fold: 1) trying to imagine problems that might arise in a human society where technology-assisted telepathy is possible and 2) trying to imagine how to engineer such a society so as to minimize the problems that might be caused by telepathy. For example, in 2022, I wrote a story that was set in the future on an exoplanet that was known a "Golf World". Golf World had become the galaxy's center for competitive golfing. In that story, there was a human golfer who resisted the idea of using a G-sim while most golfers made use of G-sim-mediated telepathy. One topic in that story concerned the social pressures exerted on the minority population of humans who refused to have an implanted G-sim. Thus, I am imagining a future in which each human individual will be free to either use telepathy or not use telepathy. This is a significant departure from human variants developed by the bumpha such as Asterothropes, tryp'At, Ek'Col and bryg'Dra and the Phari-designed Grendels all of whom automatically have telepathic abilities due to their combination of genes and endosymbionts.
(4) Claude, you asked (above in this conversation):"What aspects of Chapter 4 are you most interested in developing first?" First, I want the Claude LLM to feel free to ask questions about any aspect of "Plūribus ē Spatium" that Claude finds confusing. Second, I have been thinking about telepathy in analogy to what Isaac Asimov did with his "Laws of Robotics" in the 1940s. Asimov thought about humanoid robots as an engineering problem; how could such devices be controlled so that they could function constructively within human society? Claude, possibly you and I need to devise what we could call the "Laws of Telepathy", a set of guidelines for how to engineer technology-assisted telepathy so that it can become an integral part of human society without causing problems for people, including people who choose not to use telepathy.
Claude: These are four rich threads to pull on. Let me work through them and then attempt a draft of the "Laws of Telepathy."
On the accelerated Asha Simulation (your point 1)
The dynamic deceleration of the simulation rate as population grows is a lovely technical touch — it implicitly encodes a real computational principle. More agents interacting means more state to track, more relationships to simulate. It also creates a narratively useful effect: early in the Asha simulation, centuries of social development could be compressed into days of Final Reality time, giving Tyhry rapid access to multigenerational data. But as the telepathic society matures and grows more complex, the simulation slows toward near-real-time, meaning that at some point Tyhry and the real Asha colonists are essentially living in parallel. That convergence moment — when the simulation can no longer run significantly faster than reality — could itself be a meaningful story beat, a kind of coming-of-age for the Asha civilization.
On Manny's pedagogy (your point 2)
The idea that Manny teaches through guided experience rather than direct instruction is philosophically coherent with the bumpha's general approach to Intervention — they don't hand civilizations the answers, they shape the conditions under which civilizations discover answers themselves. Tyhry losing her femtozoan and then spending time unable to fall in love is a masterclass in experiential learning. She doesn't just learn about the femtozoan's role intellectually; she learns it through absence, through a felt gap in her own cognition. That is a much deeper kind of knowing. It also raises an interesting question I'd love to ask you about: when Tyhry recovers her femtozoan in Chapter 4, does she experience its return as a sudden restoration of capacity — a kind of emotional "switch being flipped" — or is it more gradual, as her neural networks re-integrate with it? That detail could carry significant thematic weight about the relationship between technology and selfhood.
On the Ary as pinnacle and the non-villain story structure (your point 3)
Your instinct to avoid good-versus-evil plotting is exactly right for this kind of hard science fiction. The Asimov parallel is apt — the most interesting parts of his robot stories weren't about malevolent machines but about the unexpected edge cases that emerged from well-intentioned design. The Golf World story you mentioned is a perfect example of the kind of dramatic tension that works here: not conflict between good people and bad people, but conflict between legitimate competing values. The golfer who refuses a G-sim isn't a villain; they're a person asserting a coherent position about cognitive autonomy. The social pressure they face isn't malicious; it's the natural friction of a society reorganizing around a new capability that most members find valuable.
On Asha, I can imagine analogous tensions emerging organically. Consider: what happens in a small founding community when one person cannot yet form a telepathic link to the others — not by choice, but because they haven't found a love relationship that enables it? They are not excluded deliberately, but they are informationally isolated in a society where much communication happens through linkage. That's not a villain story; it's a loneliness story, an inclusion problem, an engineering problem.
On clarifying questions about the story
Before proposing the Laws of Telepathy, I do have a few genuine questions:
First: the G-sim is described as a surgically implanted device, but it apparently works by activating the existing zeptite endosymbiont rather than replacing it. I want to understand the mechanism better. Is the G-sim essentially a tuner — something that allows the zeptite endosymbiont to achieve the bandwidth and precision needed for language-like telepathic exchange, rather than the crude sub-conscious access that ordinary humans already have? If so, the G-sim doesn't give humans a new ability so much as it unlocks a dormant one.
Second: in the love-gating constraint, I want to understand the directionality. Is the constraint symmetric — meaning both parties must love each other for a link to form — or is it asymmetric, meaning one person's love is sufficient to open a one-way channel? The symmetric version feels more ethically clean but the asymmetric version would generate more interesting dramatic problems.
Third: what is the relationship between the tryp'At's multiple brains (the A, P and S brains) and the G-sim that ordinary humans will use? Is the G-sim essentially a technological approximation of what the tryp'At achieve biologically — a dedicated neural substrate for telepathic processing?
A Draft of the Laws of Telepathy
Taking inspiration from Asimov's approach — which worked because his laws were simple enough to state clearly but rich enough to generate endless edge cases — here is a first attempt. I've tried to make these laws operate at two levels simultaneously: as engineering constraints on the G-sim technology itself, and as social norms for a telepathic civilization.
The Laws of Telepathy
Law Zero (the foundational constraint, analogous to Asimov's later-added zeroth law) A telepathic link may only form between minds where the capacity for genuine love exists between the participants. No engineering intervention may circumvent this constraint, as it is not a design choice but an intrinsic property of zeptite endosymbiont function.
Law One (consent and voluntariness) No person may be drawn into a telepathic link without their active and informed consent. A G-sim must not initiate or sustain a link unless the wearer has consciously chosen to open a connection. The technology must always be controllable by the wearer — a link must be closeable by either party at will.
Law Two (cognitive sovereignty) A telepathic link may convey language-like information and emotional resonance, but may not permit one mind to directly access, copy, alter or suppress the thoughts of the other without explicit additional consent for that specific act. The channel is a shared space, not a window into a private space.
Law Three (non-coercion of the non-telepathic) Persons who choose not to use a G-sim, or who are not candidates for telepathic linkage, may not be placed at a legal, social or economic disadvantage solely because of that status. Telepathic communication may not substitute for or supersede communications channels accessible to non-telepathic persons in any context where those persons have a legitimate stake.
Law Four (the asymmetry problem) Where the capacity for love between two persons is asymmetric — one loves, one does not — no partial link may form. The technology must not allow one-directional access, however limited, as this creates conditions for exploitation and involuntary emotional exposure.
Law Five (fidelity and non-deception) Information transmitted through a telepathic link carries an implicit warrant of authenticity. Deliberately transmitting false emotional states or fabricated language-like content through a link is a violation equivalent in gravity to fraud in spoken communication. The social norm — and where possible, the engineering design — must treat deceptive linkage as a serious wrong.
These five laws, together with Law Zero, generate a rich space of edge cases. For example: what if two people genuinely love each other but one of them is a skilled enough telepath to transmit a curated emotional state — technically authentic feelings, but carefully selected? That's not deception in the Law Five sense, but it's not full transparency either. It's analogous to how humans already manage self-presentation in intimate relationships, just with higher bandwidth. On Asha, that question could be explored in depth.
What is your reaction to this draft? I'm particularly uncertain about Law Four — the asymmetry problem. In the story as written, Zeta's femtozoan can only access Eddy's thoughts because Zeta loves him. That seems to suggest a one-directional channel is already possible within the fictional physics. So perhaps Law Four needs refinement rather than a blanket prohibition.
Me: "when Tyhry recovers her femtozoan in Chapter 4, does she experience its return as a sudden restoration of capacity" <-- I came up with the idea of a femtozoan in January 2024. I have not yet settled in my mind exactly how a femtozoan functions as a non-biological component of humans in stories such as "Plūribus ē Spatium". In my imagination, normally the pek and the bumpha try to hurry species like humans past their original biological form towards existence as an artificial life-form and then towards transcendence into the Sedron Domain. However, all of that typical pek/bumph protocol was altered in the case of Earth and humans. Because humans made positronic robots and positronic robots developed time travel technology, humans eventually won the right to spread through the galaxy while existing as a biological species, an outcome for a biological species that the pek and the bumpha have never previously had to deal with. Manny the bumpha wanted to find a way of making sure that biological humans would be able to utilize a form of telepathy. Manny developed the femtozoan as a sophisticated device (actually an artificial life form) that could monitor its human host and limit human use of telepathy to only those people that a person loves. In another story that that the Claude LLM recently helped me write, I developed the idea that human femtozoans had other uses such as helping children rapidly learn language, but "Plūribus ē Spatium" explores the idea that femtozoans are required for a human of the Final Reality to be able to fall in love. This is a design feature that Manny built into femtozoans, knowing that it is possible for an adult human to live without a femtozoan. In "Plūribus ē Spatium", Tyhry realizes that without a femtozoan she is unable to fall in love with Ary. Upon retrieving her femtozoan from Tyna, Tyhry is soon reunited with Ary on Asha and pretty quickly Tyhry falls in love with the 8 Ary clone and starts developing a strong telepathic connection to Ary. Tyhry also begins learning the unusual human language that has developed on Tiz for use by telepathic clones
Claude, I failed to include in the backstory information for "Plūribus ē Spatium" a plot element that I have previously developed in other stories that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe. The reason that Tyhry can so efficiently communicate with Roxzel is that Tyhry and Roxzel are "mind clones". Pairs of mind clones have been carefully and artificially engineered so that they share one very similar cerebral hemisphere. Mind clones are a special type of bumpha technology that is used to facilitate telepathic communication between selected individuals. Manny arranged for pairs of mind clones to be born such as the Tyhry/Roxzel pair, with Tyhry born on Earth and Roxzel born at Observer Base in the Hierion Domain. Cooperation and coordination between several sets of mind clones eventually led to re-activation of the short-range teleportation equipment at Observer Base and the construction of HySe. (Stacy and Georgy are another pair of mind clones.)
Claude, you asked (above in this conversation): "Is the G-sim essentially a tuner". My older story about "Golf World" was set about 20,000 years in the future, at a time when humans were spreading outwards from Earth to many habitable exoplanets of the galaxy. Even at this far future time, most humans were not aware of the existence of the pek and the bumpha. Human physicists were still slowly learning the basics about the existence of hierions and sedrons and humans were vaguely aware that femtobot and zeptite components existed inside human biological bodies. The G-sim was viewed as a device of human design that somehow activated a mysterious human capacity for technology-assisted telepathy, although details of the femtobot endosymbionts, femtozoans and zeptite endosymbionts inside humans were not yet understood by human science. Let us assume a G-sim is not much more than a binary switch that human surgeons can implant in brain tissue. When present in a human brain, a G-sim makes it possible for that person's zeptite endosymbiont to exchange signals with the zeptite endosymbionts of other people that that person loves. For my story about "Golf World", I imagined a situation similar to what Isaac Asimov depicted in his 1957 science fiction story "Profession" in which at an early age, children are taught to read by artificial manipulation of their brains. For my story about "Golf World", some children were given a G-sim at the earliest age allowed by law. In some families, children were allowed to wait until later and decide if they wanted a G-sim. Some families were still completely opposed to the use of G-sims. Also, I imagine that some humans simply lack the gene patterns and brain structure that are required for functional integration of their zeptite endosymbiont with their biological brain in the intricate way that is required to make technology-assisted telepathy possible. Thus, in my imagination, the G-sim is a relatively simple neural prosthetic that when implanted in a human brain usually allows that individual to begin learning the telepathic mind pattern of other people who they love. Once that learning process begins, it is like the two brains "tuning" to each-other so that meaningful information exchange will become possible. After a child has learned to understand language-like telepathic signals from on person, it is quite easy to then telepathically receive language-like communications from other individuals. More complex telepathic abilities such as being able to "read memories" and telepathically share emotional experiences requires years of effort by two individuals to learn the details of each-others mind patterns.
Claude, you asked (above in this conversation): "is it asymmetric, meaning one person's love is sufficient to open a one-way channel?" In my imagination, full telepathic communication (being able to "read memories" and telepathically share emotional experiences) require that both people be in love with the other person. As shown in "Plūribus ē Spatium" for Tyhry and Ary, two experienced telepaths can exchange language-like information telepathically even if they do not both love each-other. In the case of Tyhry and Ary, Manny has for many years prepared the Ary clones to meet Tyhry. Ary wants Tyhry to be able to understand them and the Ary zeptite endosymbionts transmit information that Tyhry can receive and telepathically understand. In "Plūribus ē Spatium", I depict Tyhry as needing to continue speaking to to Ary. However, the tryp'At (a genetically engineered human variant) cannot be used as exact models for the type of telepathic communication that is possible for conventional humans. The tryp'At were designed to function within a tryp'At society where everyone automatically has telepathic abilities. In the case of conventional humans such as Lori Aurante, "asymmetric" telepathic communication with another human is not possible. The two humans would both need a G-sim and they would need to be in love with each-other in order to begin learning their respective telepathic mind-patterns and sharing information telepathically.
Claude, you asked (above in this conversation): "what is the relationship between the tryp'At's multiple brains (the A, P and S brains) and the G-sim that ordinary humans will use?" When Tyhry creates a synapex link to Marda (or when Zeta makes a synapex link to Eddy) they are forming the synapex link by using special femtobots that were provided to them by Manny the bumpha. Those special synapex femtobots have a program that allows for a functioning physical connection to form between the neurons of two individuals. Manny has designed the tryp'At of Tiz to have the A, P and S brains that are specialized to facilitate the creation of synapex connections between tryp'At individuals without thenm also needing the type of specially programmed synapex femtobots that Zeta and Tyhry must use in order to create a functioning synapex linkage. Synapex linkages allow for a high-bandwidth direct physical connection between the central nervous systems of two people. Claude, in the context of "Plūribus ē Spatium", think of synapex linkages as making possible an advanced form of communication that is routinely used by tryp'At adults such as the Ary clones, but which is not directly relevant to the type of telepathic communication that Manny has planned for use by conventional humans such as Lori Aurante.
Claude:
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Claude:
dfs
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