Return of Sedruth?

Nyrtia, M2 robot, Tyhry. Image generated by Flow.

 Below on this blog page is my version (4,200 words) of Chapter 7 of the science fiction story "The RNA Seeds".  To make my version of Chapter 7, I started with the a 3,700 word-long first draft that had been generated by Claude (see my previous blog post titled "A Manikoid Reality").

In Chapter 7, Marda (or mare accurately, the zeptozoan who is inside Marda's body)nreveals herself as another secret operative inside Casanay. She begins collaborating with Anthony to study how the Reality Viewer that is now inside Eddy's computer. The Sedruth entity who assists Eddy with the Reality Viewer is conspicuous by his absence in Chapter 7 and does not reveal himself to Nyrtia or Anthony.

I'm using Chapters 1 - 3 of "The Manikoid Intervention" as a 'story within a story' and counting them as Chapters 4 - 6 of "The RNA Seeds".  

For "The RNA Seeds", I'm trying to depict the transition between two era's on Earth. The first era was one in which the pek and the bumpha gradually guided the evolution of life on Earth towards the development of the human species. For 4,000,000,000 years, the pek remained unaware of the fact that the bumpha were secretly using advanced sedron-based technologies to facilitate their Interventions into the events on Earth. Then, around the year 2000, a dramatic transition began to occur, shifting Earth into a new era in which the bumpha no longer tried to conceal from the pek the fact that the bumpha had time travel technology.

Casanay

That transition between eras involved what became known as the "Casanay Intervention". The first phase of the "Casanay Intervention" involved Manny the bumpha providing Eddy Watson with information about past Realities of Earth. Nyrtia, the pek Overseer of Earth, quickly noticed noticed that Eddy was writing science fiction stories that featured the pek and the bumpha. However, since every human on Earth, including Eddy, believed that the pek and the bumpha were fictional constructs, existing only in Eddy's stories, the pek allowed the "Casanay Intervention" to continue. Nyrtia deployed her agent, Anthony, on Earth, right inside Casanay. Anthony was tasked with determining the ultimate goal of the Casanay Intervention and making sure that nobody on Earth ever obtained evidence that the pek and bumpha were real.

Anthony's ability to monitor events inside Casanay was aided by the fact that humans all had hidden within them a femtobot endosymbiont. Life on Earth had evolved as a composite of biological cells and invisibly small femtobots. The femtobots that existed inside the human brain were functionally integrated with the neurons and each person's femtobot endosymbiont generated hierion-based signals that constantly reflected the activity of that person's neural network. By receiving and monitoring those hierion signals that were broadcast by human brains, Anthony could monitor Eddy's thought processes and beliefs and Anthony knew that Eddy believed that the pek and bumpha were his literary creations.

Tyhry Watson.

In fact, Eddy was under the influence of bumpha memory control infites which simultaneously made him aware of events from past Realities and forcibly prevented Eddy from believing that the pek and bumpha might be real. Eddy could not resist writing himself and his acquaintances into his stories. Eddy's most recently completed novel depicted Anthony as a pek Observer and his daughter, Tyhry, as using advanced bumpha technology, the Sedron Time Stream, to obtain information from the future.

Tyhry had grown up at Casanay with very little interest in her father's stories, until the day when a plot element in one of Eddy's novels suddenly seemed relevant to Tyhry's biology research.

Chapter 7 of “The RNA Seeds”: The Viewer Menu (Chapter 1)(Chapter 2)(Chapter 3)(Chapter 4)(Chapter 5)(Chapter 6)

The great room was dark except for the glow of a power indicator light on the big old desktop computer at Eddy's workstation where he crafted his science fiction stories.

Aunt Beryl had waited until she was quite certain that the last sounds of human habitation — Tyhry's water running, Marda's light going out under her door, the particular sequence of small noises that announced Eddy settling into sleep — had all resolved into silence. Then, because she could monitor the hierion-based signals coming from the femtobot endosymbionts inside the brains of the Watson family members and Marda, she had waited an additional twenty minutes until it was clear that everyone was finally asleep. Four billion years of observing biological life had a way of making twenty minutes feel like the blink of an eye. Beryl quietly exited from her bedroom suite and went to the Casanay great room.

Arriving from his suite of rooms in another wing of Casanay, Anthony was already at the workstation when Beryl arrived. Two cats were confused by the lateness of the hour and this unusual human activity in the great room. Pepper was on the arm of the sofa. Luna had taken the windowsill. Trib was asleep on a rug and in no condition to notice the arrival of Anthony and Beryl in the great room.

Anthony nodded to Nyrtia. "It's still there," Anthony said quietly, indicating the 'Viewer' menu on the menu bar with a quick stab of his finger.

The Viewer menu sat between two of Eddy's standard application menus, exactly where it had been since Manny installed it. It looked like a menu that had always been there, which was the best kind of disguise.

"Let me," she said.

Anthony moved aside and Nyrtia settled into Eddy's chair. She looked at the screen for a moment with the focused, evaluative attention that she brought to all obstacles, then she clicked the word 'Viewer' and discovered that she had clicked on a simple button, not on a drop-down menu.

The screen filled with an array of images.

The images were Eddy's illustrations, arranged in folders for each of his novels. She recognized the cover illustrations for the novels that were the images on each of the blockish folder icons in the array. The cover for Eddy's most recently published novel, Battlefield Lipid, included a bumpha depicted as a shimmering cloud of light with vaguely humanoid proportions. There was also a pek in its preferred form, tall and thin and attentive. In the background was a diagram depicting the Hierion and Sedron Domains of the universe, both linked to the Hadron Domain. Manny clicked on that folder, it opened and she saw that it contained many illustrations that Eddy had crafted for Battlefield Lipid. A femtobot magnified ten billion times, rendered from Eddy's imagination with more artistic than technical fidelity. An image labeled Manny and the Sedron Time Stream in which a glowing figure reached toward a braided column of light against a star field.

The list of images in the folder scrolled on, perfectly organized, including abandoned draft files.

Nyrtia clicked her way back to the root folder and sat back in the chair. One of the other book cover illustrations on the display screen was Eddy's artistic rendering of Observer Base, rendered with the cheerful inaccuracy of his imagination.

"Manny," Nyrtia said, quietly, in a tone that contained four billion years of accumulated exasperation and also, despite everything, a grudging thread of appreciation, "and her tricks."

Anthony said nothing. He had been an Observer long enough to know when silence was the correct response to Nyrtia's frustration.

She clicked through three more of the subfolders. Each one led, with the smooth efficiency of well-designed software, to a different set of Eddy's illustrations. Eddy had crafted a great many illustrations. He had been writing science fiction for a very long time and he loved to illustrate his stories as much as write them.

"Anthony, figure out how to access the Reality Viewer," Nyrtia said. "I want this all documented. The Viewer exists and is available to Eddy. Find a way to get the Viewer to show you what it shows Eddy, not these image files."

Anthony noted this in the way he noted everything: completely, without visible reaction, for the record.

Nyrtia looked at the image of Manny on the screen one final time. Eddy had depicted Manny as a benevolent, luminous figure of great beauty, which, Nyrtia reflected, said a great deal about Manny's management of Eddy's perceptions over the past three decades.

She walked out of the great room and returned to her bedroom, leaving the image gallery open. Anthony examined the code for the 'Viewer' menu, but learned nothing useful. That 'Viewer' button had been programmed to open up Eddy's images folder for his novels. Anthony restarted Eddy's computer and then deployed some of his monitor femtobots inside the computer so that they would carefully monitor the device's activity when next used by Eddy. Then Anthony returned to his suite, planning to be in the great room the next time Eddy used the Reality Viewer.

__

The idea arrived not feeling like a fuzzy remembered dream, but as a certainty.

Tyhry woke at six-seventeen and lay in the dark for two minutes with the distinct sensation of a thought that had finished assembling itself while she was in her REM state of consciousness and was now simply waiting there, complete, to be examined. This was not the first time this had happened to her. It had been happening with increasing frequency. She briefly reflected on the recent night when she had written in the margins of Battlefield Lipid, and she compared the way she felt now to her memory of that other day. She had learned not to grab too wildly at these fragment-images that came to her in the space between sleep and waking. They needed to emerge at their own natural pace of integrating into the thought streams of her waking consciousness.

She reached for the notepad on the small table and wrote for several minutes without pausing.

This new idea was about ribozymes. Specifically, it concerned the question of where Earth's first ribozymes had come from — not the question of how they worked, which was what she had been studying. The canonical answer to that question was: the first ribozymes arose by spontaneous prebiotic chemistry: given enough time, given the right conditions, given the rich mixture of organic molecules that had been present on early Earth, functional ribozymes would arise by random chance.

The new idea that was waiting for her when she woke was: no.

Not a violent no. Not a dismissal of the idea of prebiotic RNA chemistry. More like a quiet but complete confidence that the first ribozymes on Earth had been designed. That someone, or something, had seeded the early Earth with exquisitely engineered molecular machinery and then waited to see what kind of cellular life would arise from that. Tyhry had never taken seriously the idea of panspermia, until now.

She put down the notepad and looked at what she had written.

This is the kind of idea, she thought, that ruins careers. You did not publish the hypothesis that life on Earth had been seeded by aliens. You did not get up at a conference and suggest that the first ribozymes had been engineered by an extraterrestrial intelligence. You did not do these things if you wanted to be taken seriously in the scientific community, which Tyhry did, very much, and which she had been working toward since she was old enough to understand that wanting to be taken seriously required actually doing rigorous work.

She set the notepad down and thought about what she had read just before going to bed.

She was thinking about Eddy's story. He had never previously shared with Tyhry a pre-publication draft of a story. There had to be a reason why he had asked her to read the first three chapters of The Manikoid Intervention. Now Tyhry reflected on the fact that there was a warning embedded in the first three chapters of The Manikoid Intervention that was not subtle, particularly if your name was 'Tyhry', just like the protagonist in The Manikoid Intervention. Tyhry had long ago grown comfortable with the idea that Eddy often wrote the residents of Casanay into his stories. Fortunately, Eddy's writings were obscure enough that none of her scientific colleagues, besides Marda, had ever admitted to reading any of Eddy's stories. Marda was a strange case.

In Eddy's story, The Manikoid Intervention, Tyhry-the-character had lost everything — had been removed from Earth and from her work and from her family — because she had moved too fast and spoken too openly about things that the pek did not want spoken about. That Tyhry had ended up at Observer Base because she had revealed a dangerous truth to Anthony, Nyrtia's Observer on Earth.

Tyhry had read those chapters before falling asleep, but now she reflected on the warning in the context of her new belief that aliens were responsible for there being life on Earth.

For now, Tyhry would focus on her experiments. The RNA ligase modification to PTC-7. The proto-membrane-protein hypothesis, which was genuinely novel and genuinely publishable and had the considerable advantage of being just chemistry without the need for any reference to aliens. She would do the lab work. She would accumulate the data required for an interesting scientific publication. She would, for the time being, keep her larger suspicions in the notepad beside her bed and nowhere else.

She got up and went to the shower, her first step towards arriving in the dining room for breakfast looking like a serious young molecular biology researcher.

__

At breakfast, Eddy asked Tyhry if she had finished reading the three chapters of his new story. Marda had instantly butted in and expressed interest. Eddy had told Marda, “I don't like to spread my stuff too widely until it is in print.” Then Aunt Beryl walked in, ready to enjoy her son's cooking and the conversation had shifted.

Later, in the laboratory, Marda had asked Tyhry for a copy of the three chapters and Tyhry sent them to her with a warning, “Don't speak to anyone about this... except Eddy.”

Marda read the three chapters over lunch, eating with one hand and working her tablet with the other, in a focused silence. Tyhry went for a run in the desert then returned to the laboratory, cooling herself in front of a fan and watching Marda's face while she finished reading.

"This is a story he just wrote," Marda said, looking up. "While we were in Sedona."

"He emailed these first chapters to me while we were on the way back."

"And the fictional Tyhry in The Manikoid Intervention ends up at Observer Base." Marda turned a page. "Eddy is warning you."

"I think so."

Marda set the tablet down and looked at Tyhry and asked, "You have been given some form of alien technology?"

Tyhry shrugged. "I've been having strange, intrusive thoughts. What if aliens are helping me? It is not just me. Maybe aliens have been helping people for a very long time."

"Help via alien technology... the Sedron Time Stream?" Marda glanced at a page of The Manikoid Intervention being displayed on her tablet. "An alien Observer on Earth." She paused. "Anthony."

"I can't bring myself to believe that Anthony is an alien," Tyhry said, in a voice that was not quite as neutral as she intended. "You can't discuss this with anyone except Eddy, particularly not Anthony."

"Anthony is amused by how Eddy writes him into novels. I've seen him laugh about it." Marda looked at the display screen. After a moment she said, very mildly, "The basement lab in the Manikoid Reality has different equipment."

"Yes."

"That Tyhry is doing robotics. Not working with ribozymes."

"Yes. It is a different Reality."

Marda turned off the tablet and set it face-down on a lab bench. "Twenty new ideas a day," Marda said.

"Today it's mostly one idea," Tyhry said. "Let's finalize our selection of the ligase insertion points." They returned to the RNA world and Tyhry forgot about aliens for a few blissful hours.

__

Aunt Beryl found Eddy on the back patio in the mid-morning, sitting with a cat in his lap and the expression he wore when he was working through a structural problem in a story without the assistance of the keyboard. She sat down across from him and he came up from wherever he'd been, blinking slightly, and offered her the automatic hospitality of a man who had been raised to be welcoming even when interrupted. “I'm not interrupting?”

“Just plotting out a story.”

"Your new story," she said. "How did the idea come to you?"

Eddy looked at the desert. "The usual way." He continued scratching the cat's ear. This was Luna. Luna tolerated Eddy's touch with what looked like imperial indifference, but if he had tried to stop, Luna would have swiped at his hand as a warning that he must continue. "I sat down and something arrived. I've been assembling the infrastructure for years — the bumpha, the pek, the Sedron Time Stream, the Rules of Intervention. And at some point the infrastructure is complete enough that new stories appear, wanting to exist inside the fictional universe that I use for all my stories." He shrugged. "I'm a machine for imagining crazy ideas. If I seriously tried to explain how it works, I'd probably stop being able to do it."

Beryl looked at him for a moment. "Do you ever wonder whether the ideas are entirely your own?"

Eddy smiled. It was the smile of a man who had been asked some version of this question before and had made peace with the answer. "Every writer wonders that. The honest answer is no. Nothing is entirely my own. Everything I write comes from somewhere." He continued, "Isaac Asimov explained the situation for science fiction story tellers: we craft our stories from what we experience in our lives. What other answer could there be?"

Nyrtia did not expect Eddy to speak about the Reality Viewer. The behavioral control nanites that Manny had placed in his brain held strong. Aunt Beryl muttered, “There are many different kinds of experience.” She went back inside Casanay.

Aunt Beryl stayed through lunch and afterward Zeta walked her to her rental car.

"We'll see you at Christmas?" Zeta asked.

"Unless Iowa has other plans for me." Beryl embraced Zeta with the warmth she had never found it difficult to make real, because the warmth, over the years, had become real. This was one of the small inconveniences of long-term field work. She patted one of the cats, who had come outside to supervise the departure, and got into the car.

She drove down the long unpaved driveway through the creosote without looking back. There was no useful intelligence to be gathered from looking back.

__

The great room was dark again at two in the morning.

Anthony had not been asleep. He was frustrated. Eddy had not returned to his computer until after Nyrtia's departure from Casanay. Anthony had stood there in the great room talking to Zeta while Eddy got back into the rhythm of his writing. Eddy had not clicked on the new 'Viewer' menu until later when he was alone in the great room. Anthony's femtobot monitors had recorded the workings of the computer when Eddy clicked on the 'Viewer' button. The computer sent to the display the same page of image folders that Nyrtia had been shown, somehow what Eddy saw on the Display screen was different. Somehow Eddy was able to see and use the Reality Viewer interface.

Anthony was still parsing through all of the data that he had captured from Eddy's computer when he noticed Marda leave her bedroom suite at one-fifty-three. She went to the great room and began using Eddy's computer. Anthony had given it three minutes, and then he had walked quietly down the hallway to the great room.

Marda was sitting at Eddy's workstation. The screen showed the Viewer interface — not the image gallery. On the display screen was a complex, branching structure that resolved, as Anthony moved closer and his eyes adjusted, into a map of timelines, the Realities of Earth's Reality Chain. To one side, the swarm of possible future Realities was dense with labeled nodes and connecting pathways that ramified away from a central trunk like the root system of a very old tree.

Marda had not startled when he entered. She turned and looked at him with the expression of someone who had been expecting him for some time.

"This is a good time for us to use the Viewer," Marda said. She said this in the tone of a person providing an explanation that both parties understand to be technically accurate and substantially incomplete. Her voice was the voice of a person who was genuinely interested in what she was looking at, and Anthony, who had spent a great deal of time studying Marda, was working hard to determine exactly who he was now with. "This is where Eddy gots his idea for his new story," she said. She clicked on the node for the Manikoid Reality. "I think this is the specific Reality he's been looking at."

"How do you know?"

She pointed to a cluster of nodes near the center of the display. They were connected by pathways of different colors — some bright, some dim, some rendered as dotted lines that suggested conditionality or uncertainty. "This looks like it might be the current Reality. This central node in the map. And these pathways going forward — these must all be possible futures." She traced the mouse-driven pointer along one of the brighter connecting lines then clicked on the node for the Manikoid Reality. "Look here.” She moved the cursor down to the bottom of the diagram. “This button labeled RNA."

Anthony leaned closer. He was quite certain that Eddy had never used that feature of the Viewer.

When she clicked on the RNA button, a menu opened and the title of the menu automatically expanded to now read: RNA — Reality Nexus Assembler.

"This is the interesting part," Marda said, and released the mouse button, completing the click.

The display shifted and now showed only two nodes; one for the current Reality and the other was the Manikoid Reality. Between those two nodes was a complex branching network map but overlaid now with a new layer of information. As she explored the network with the pointer, a highlighting system identified specific branch points and annotated the pathways with what appeared to be probability values and pop-up windows describing transition conditions. The visual logic of it was not immediately obvious, but it had the quality of a functional tool that could be operated by someone who knew what they were doing.

"It looks like this Assembler identifies possible pathways," Marda said, "linking from where we are to somewhere we want to be: a new Reality. And then — I think — it can help determine what would be required to move from one Reality to the other." She paused, in the way of someone thinking deeply. "A time traveler would use this Reality Viewer and the Reality Nexus Assembler to actually bring a new Reality into existence."

Anthony was quiet while he shifted his eyes off of the display screen and then gazed at Marda's pretty face, glowing in the light of the computer screen. "You're Manny's agent," he said. His words were not an accusation. They had the quality of a finding, precisely stated.

Marda turned and looked at him. Her expression was unreadable and entirely composed. "And you're Nyrtia's," she said. "We've been having a very polite time of it, both of us pretending to be normal people." The corner of her mouth moved. "My mission, if you'd like to know, is to keep Tyhry out of Observer Base. To make sure she gets to finish what she's started here on Earth. Right now, it looks like I'm working against Manny who seems intent on forcing Tyhry to start believing in space aliens." Marda giggled.

"If not Manny, then who are you actually working for?"

Seemingly intimidated by the intensity of Anthony's gaze and question, Marda looked back at the display screen. "The Phari," she said, "have an interest in understanding how bumpha time travel technology has been secretly used to construct Earth's Reality Chain. My goal is to learn how to use this Viewer—" she gestured at the RNA interface, "—learn to use this tool to plan a Reality Change. Maybe I can discover what Manny is planning for the next Reality and... switch it." A pause. "Switch the Change to something that the Phari want."

Anthony looked again at the branching timeline map. The RNA interface and the probability annotations on the connecting pathways were complex and beyond his comprehension. He remembered something Nyrtia had said: Tyhry is not an accident. She is the point.

"You need a collaborator," he said.

"Working together, you and I might be able to figure out how to use the Reality Nexus Assembler."

Anthony straightened up and looked at the door that led to the hallway that led to Tyhry's bedroom suite. He thought about Nyrtia, at Observer Base now, reviewing surveillance records from this morning. Surely she had reached the same conclusion as had Anthony: Tyhry was on the brink of speaking to others about her belief in aliens who secretly created and managed life on Earth. He thought about the Viewer menu opening for Marda and not for Nyrtia, and how to complete his assigned mission.

"I'll need to send a report about this to the Overseer," he said.

"Of course." Marda had her attention to the RNA interface. She was studying the probability annotations on the pathways radiating from the current-Reality. She seemed to be genuinely working through something she found difficult. "I would expect nothing less from Nyrtia's agent inside Casanay."

Anthony watched Marda for another minute, then resisting the temptation to also examine the probability matrix that she had brought onto the display screen, he went back to his rooms.

__

He did not sleep. He composed a careful report to Nyrtia — thorough, precise, noting that Marda had accessed the Viewer without apparent difficulty and had demonstrated the RNA function, noting the Phari claim, noting the collaborative proposal, noting that none of it could yet be confirmed and all of it merited close observation. He recommended maintaining their current operational posture and allowing the situation at Casanay to continue to develop.

He sent the report to Nyrtia and looked out the window at the star-lit desert. Something was wrong. Not with Marda's story — or rather, the wrongness was not in any detail he could yet specify. It was a structural wrongness, the feeling of a situation that has been arranged rather than allowed to happen. Manny had installed the Viewer. Manny had locked it against Nyrtia. Manny had, apparently, arranged for Marda to use the Viewer. Was Marda a double agent, working for both Manny and the Phari?

Every element of this pointed in the same direction. He was being invited to participate in something. The invitation was designed to be irresistible.

He thought about the idea that Marda might have a nanite key that unlocked the Reality Viewer functionality of Eddy's computer. Marda had no obvious mechanism by which she could have unlocked the Viewer: no device, no credential, nothing he had detected. But something had opened it. Possibly something so small as to be below the detection threshold of his routinely-deployed Observation tools.

He would need to deploy his femtobot monitors more carefully. He would need to get closer to Marda during the next session, close enough to have a chance of detecting whatever it was that she carried with her that Nyrtia and he did not: almost certainly a nanite key.

In the morning he would prepare coffee and breakfast and he would watch Marda across the table with the same mild, pleasant attention he brought to everything. He would give nothing away.

But he found himself, in the quiet of his room, less focused on what he would do in the morning than on what Marda might show him the next night. The RNA interface. The branching pathways. The probability annotations on the routes between one Reality and the next.

What type of new Reality, he thought, would the Phari want to bring into existence?

He would ask Marda. Carefully. And while he was asking, he would be listening for the truth beneath her answer.

Outside, the high desert was very quiet. The stars that were visible through his window were, as always, indifferent. Marda had given up examining the probability matrix and returned to her bedroom. In the great room, Eddy's workstation had gone dark again, but Manny's special artwork remained, illuminating everything at Casanay.

End Chapter 7

Next: planning Chapter 8 of "The RNA Seeds".

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