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| Nyrtia, Tyhry and the M2 robot at Observer Base. |
Chapter 8 of “The RNA Seeds”: The Fan (Chap. 1)(Chap. 2)(Chap. 3)(Chap. 4)(Chap. 5)(Chap. 6)(Chap. 7)
Casanay was strategically located at a middle altitude from which it was possible to drive a few hours south to higher temperatures or drive to the mountains to reach cooler air. Summer was arriving in Arizona and this morning's air was warming rapidly at Casanay as the sun climbed in the sky. Six months previously, Eddy had scheduled one of his rare book signing events in Flagstaff, anticipating that Zeta would appreciate a break from the heat at Casanay. With their travel bags already loaded in the car the previous evening, the cats knew something was up. For breakfast only Trib and Pepper were in the dining room. The other cats were hiding and confused, suspecting that this might be a day when they would be carted off for an annual visit to the veterinarian.
Eddy was in an excellent mood which had been rising steadily all week. When he sat down at the breakfast table, he looked like a man who had been sitting on a piece of good news long enough that it had become necessary to share it. "I finished chapter seven," he said, to no one in particular, in the tone of someone resuming a conversation that other people had not realized was ongoing. "And I'm really enjoying my Systolina character, the mystery robot of Observer Base."
Zeta, who was checking the status of a dinner reservation in Flagstaff on her phone with the focused attention she brought to financial instruments and quarterly reports, did not look up. She was standing just inside the dining room, trying not to violate the spirit of the Casanay rule which forbade the use of electronic devices at the dining room table during meals. "The new story."
"The Manikoid Intervention." Eddy helped himself to more of the blue berries that were on his plate, spearing them with his fork. "I have never had a story come this quickly. It has the feeling of something that already existed — I am just transcribing it."
"Like a secretary," Marda suggested, from her end of the table. She was eating her egg substitute with the slightly combative cheerfulness she had developed for meals at Casanay where the carnivorous tendencies of the Watson household were on full display.
"Like an extremely talented secretary who effortlessly gets tasks done without having to be given detailed instructions," Eddy agreed.
Anthony set Zeta's bagel on the table and seated himself at the table 1.5 seconds after Zeta put her phone in her pocket and sat down beside Eddy. Eddy glanced at Anthony — a brief, evaluating look that could have meant anything. In this case, Eddy was marveling for the 374
th time at Anthony's apparent ability to know exactly when people would reach the table. Then Eddy returned his attention to an annoying little berry that seemed intent on avoiding his fork and kept rolling around his plate.Zeta had already grown tired of hearing about “The Manikoid Intervention”. She felt that 'manikoid' was an abominable name for a line of robots and she was already a bit jealous of the character 'Systolina' who Eddy was developing with his usual talent for falling in love with spunky young female characters that erupted from his imagination for no other apparent reason than to express and share with the world one of his personal fantasies. "Tyhry," Zeta said, speaking in a tone of voice that meant she was redirecting the conversation away from the all-engulfing vortex of Eddy's writing obsession. "How is your RNA work proceeding?"
Tyhry looked up from the omelet she had been systematically demolishing. "Okay. Really well, actually." She smiled at her mother. Marda watched Tyhry, knowing that Tyhry was actually delighted with their progress in the laboratory during the past week. "The ligase modification to PTC-7 has been producing interesting results all week. Every run."
"Every run," Zeta repeated, who had learned that in biology research, as in finance, too many successes in a row without any failure was a rarity that called out for careful scrutiny.
"Every run," Tyhry confirmed. Her voice was warm and steady, the voice of a scientist presenting a satisfying result, and it gave away nothing of the thing that had been sitting with her since the third consecutive positive result — the way a line of reasoning that was penetrating into a new domain of mathematics sometimes gives a mathematician the marvelous conviction that a new Truth had been stumbled upon.
"We should leave," Eddy said. "We'll have to deal with delay due to that detour near Flagstaff."
"I'm ready," Zeta said. She looked at Eddy. "Just let me snarf down this bagel. You know, your fans will not recognize you if you're wearing that particular shirt. You look like a lumberjack who just stumbled into town from the hills."
Eddy looked down at the shirt, which was a comfortable old plaid that he found deeply satisfying. "This is a perfectly good shirt."
"It is comfortable and clean and I love you very much. Still you should change before we leave."
Eddy's expression produced the specific sequence of movements that indicated he intended to object, had thought better of it, and was now constructing a narrative in which changing the shirt had been his own idea. He rose from the table.
"I should read from the new story," he said, as he went. "The third chapter of
The Manikoid Intervention would delight my fans. It's the first time I've ever shown Manny having to recover from a stumble... her own plaid shirt moment."As Eddy wandered off, Tyhry and Marda looked at each other across the table.
Zeta asked, "Read from a new story that you haven't published yet?"
"The fans will want to hear about it." Eddy's voice came back from the hallway, partially muffled by direction. "This one is special."
Marda asked, "Isn't every story special?"
"Eddy is acting weird ever since Aunt Beryl's visit," Zeta said.
This observation sat on the table like an item that everyone had noticed. Then Tyhry pushed back from the table and told her mother, “Have fun in Flagstaff..” Tyhry and Marda went to the laboratory, eager and hopeful that they might continue their recent string of successful experiments.
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The drive to Flagstaff was ninety minutes of winding and climbing 3,000 feet in elevation through the from Casanay, rising up into juniper and ponderosa as the elevation increased. Zeta drove. She drove the way she managed the household's finances — efficiently, without drama, slightly faster than the posted speed limit. Eddy occupied the passenger seat with his thoughts dancing around the question of just how much he could tell fans about
The Manikoid Intervention without saying too much.They were past the first set of curves that took them out of the valley that held Casanay when Zeta said, "You've never read from an unpublished story to the fans before."
Eddy seemed to be looking out the window but his thoughts were in the fictional world of
The Manikoid Intervention , a possible new Reality for Earth. A double meaning allowed Eddy to slip a sly comment past the nanites that restricted his behavior, "Think of this as my new reality... exploring the benefits of teasing my fans with the contents of a new novel.""Done right, such a teaser could boost sales," Zeta agreed. "You must have a specific reason for this particular change in your relationship with your fans."
This was not a question. Eddy was quiet for a moment, watching the landscape. He had been with Zeta for long enough to understand the difference between a question and a statement that was holding a space open for the answer it already expected. Eddy tried to find something that he could say without being silenced by the behavioral control nanites that Manny had placed in his brain. "Well, this all started because I wanted Tyhry to read
The Manikoid Intervention as soon as I had the first three chapters," he said, finally. "She has read them, but I suppose she's too busy with her work to discuss the story with me. So I want to hear someone else respond to it. I figure: that's what fans are for."Zeta said nothing. She just drove. Eddy's 'logic' had more curves than the road they were on.
"She is a scientist," Eddy continued. "She does not read my stories seriously. She has been kind about them since she was a child, but I know the difference between Tyhry being kind and Tyhry paying attention." He paused. "This story she should pay attention to."
"Because you wrote it for her?" Zeta asked.
Eddy pulled his thoughts out of the Manikoid Reality, focused his eyes and turned to look at his wife.
Zeta's eyes remained on the road, but she knew that she had her husband's attention. "Eddy. I have read every novel you have ever written. I know your writing—" She stopped. "And your process," she amended smoothly. "The Tyhry character in
The Manikoid Intervention ends up at Observer Base as a result of receiving assistance from the future."Eddy said, "Yes."
"And since Beryl visited, our Tyhry," Zeta said carefully, "has been having a productive week in which every experiment has worked."
The road climbed and the ponderosa pines grew denser and the light changed quality, filtered now rather than direct. Neither of them said anything for several miles.
"Have you spoken to Tyhry about her 'good luck'?" Eddy asked, at last.
"That something unusual is happening to Tyhry in the laboratory?" Zeta overtook a slow-moving camper van and settled back into the right lane. "After the third positive result in a row, she told me that a single breakthrough result can be inspiration and good experimental design. Three in a row is something else." She glanced at him briefly. "Now it is up to like 7 in a row. I don't ask about what I don't need to ask about. But I pay attention."
The behavioral control nanites in his brain prevented Eddy from saying what he wanted to say to his wife. He said slowly, "At some point, Tyhry might start believing that the bumpha are helping her in her work."
Zeta said nothing.
"I don't want it to appear that I'm only sharing
The Manikoid Intervention with Tyhry," Eddy continued. "So I want to share at least a fragment of the story with my fans."Zeta drove in silence for another half mile. Then she said, "Well, when you tease the fans just don't spoil the whole thing by saying too much."
Eddy and Zeta discussed what part of
The Manikoid Intervention could most usefully be shared with fans at the book signing. Eventually, Flagstaff appeared in the distance, the dark spine of the San Francisco Peaks rising behind it.__
The bookstore was called Parchment and Pine. It occupied a corner storefront on a street of low buildings near the old downtown, and it was sponsoring the book signing for a loyal and slightly eccentric group of Eddy's fans most of whom were attending NAU and most of whom were nerdy science majors with an addiction to Eddy's brand of hard science fiction. The schedule for Eddy's signing was on the hand-lettered board by the front door: E. Watson, 2PM.
The corner near the magazine racks was arranged with folding chairs facing a stool where Eddy sat with a stack of his novels on the floor at his feet topped by a plastic cup of water that he would not drink. Forty-three people came. Eddy knew many of his Flagstaff fans by name, and the ones he didn't know by name he knew by face, and the ones he didn't know by face he could classify accurately within thirty seconds: the ones who had been brought by a friend, the ones who had found his work late and come with the specific attentiveness of new converts, and the ones who had been coming for years and had a proprietary feeling about the whole enterprise.
For twenty minutes he took questions about
Battlefield Lipid , his recently published novel, as a warm-up. He was good at readings. He had been doing them long enough to know that what the audience wanted was not to be impressed by the prose but to feel that the person at the front of the room was a ring-leader for a group of people who were all enjoying themselves and their common obsession. Eddy always enjoyed creating that vibe.Then he took no further questions about his published work and said, "I have something special I want to share with you today. An excerpt from a new novel that I have not yet shared with anyone."
The room went quiet as the room full of people became attentive and expectant of a fun surprise.
Eddy pulled out his phone, where part of the text of
The Manikoid Intervention was waiting, and read the part where it is revealed that Manny's Intervention was terminated by the pek and Tyhry's memory was edited. It had become something of a joke among his fans that “Manny always wins”. The Manikoid Intervention was the first story where Eddy had depicted an apparent defeat being suffered by Manny. He read it well. He had always read his own work well.When he finished, there was excited muttering among the audience members and some scattered applause. Someone called out, "Manny did not win!" A woman near the back asked about the title, and someone else asked about the setting. Eddy was in the middle of explaining that the story was built on the same fictional universe as all his other novels when a young woman arrived.
She arrived in Eddy's consciousness when he saw her standing behind at the back row of chairs, moving with the particular forward momentum of someone who was executing a decision that would not be reconsidered. She was quite young, Eddy guessed maybe fifteen years old, dressed with the studied care of a teenager who was comfortable with her body and enjoying the practice of experimenting with people's reactions when she put carefully selected pieces of her anatomy on public display. Her hair was braided in two plaits and she was carrying, conspicuously, three of Eddy's novels, including a very old edition of his third book, which had been out of print for eleven years and which Eddy would not have expected to see outside of a specialty dealer.
"Mr. Watson," she said, interrupting him with the energy of someone who had grown tired of his rather rambling description of his Exodemic Fictional Universe, "I believe that
The Manikoid Intervention is the most important thing you have ever written."The room was still and several people looked at her with the mild indignation of people who did not expect an outsider to enter into the intimate conversation of the group.
Eddy looked at her with the particular focused attention he gave to surprises that required quick classification. "Thank you very much," he said. "I take it you are pleased to finally see me write a depiction of a Manny stumble."
"Oh, ya, that's cool, too." She beamed at him with the guileless directness of someone for whom social conventions were things that happened to other people. "I mean — I know you must think it's still rather early for a fan to offer a critique. But sometimes I know that something is important even before it's finished. Tyhry gets mind-wiped and her replicoid is sent to Observer Base, all because she receive information from a source that could not be account for — conventionally." She paused. "But the Sedron Time Stream provides a very elegant solution to Manny's problem that was created by Tyhry's use of the Sedron Time Stream. Well done!"
Eddy looked at her for a moment. The room, which had been following this exchange with the polite attention of an audience waiting for its narrative to resolve, had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense for him. "I'm glad you appreciate how
The Manikoid Intervention both fits in with and plays off of my earlier novels," he said. His voice was entirely level."All of them." She held up the old novel. "I have this one in the original hardcover edition. I found it at an estate sale in Prescott three years ago." She lowered her voice to a volume that the front rows could still hear. "I would very much like to host you and your wife for dinner and use that as a chance for me to share some of my thoughts about your amazing stories."
Eddy said, "I see." Other people in the audience asked questions like, “Wheat restaurant?” and “Where will we have dinner?”
Zeta appeared beside Eddy. She looked at the young woman, at the armful of Eddy's novels, and at the smile on Eddy's face, and she drew a conclusion which she filed for later use. "We'd be delighted to have a follow-on session for all of Eddy's fan's," she said. "Eddy will now sign copies of his novels, and then we'll be free after the conclusion of the book signing session."
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About a dozen die-hard fans assembled and ate at a place on the main street that had a long corner table and decent food and the important quality, for Eddy, of low noise levels that would not disrupt a conversation. The young woman had introduced herself as Systolina — she offered it without a last name, with the ease of a rock star for whom one name was sufficient — and she made sure to arrange the seating so that Eddy was at one end of the long table with herself and Zeta across from each other and closest to Eddy. However, Zeta was playing host and spent most of the meal circulating and talking to everyone else at the table, making sure they did not feel left-out while Systolina monopolized Eddy.
Throughout dinner Systolina was, on the surface, exactly as she had appeared in the bookstore: enthusiastic, tangential, prone to sudden changes of subject, given to expressions of admiration that were specific enough to be accurate but delivered with a warmth that managed to seem unpremeditated. She had apparently read everything ever published by Eddy. She knew his fictional universe with the comprehensive familiarity of someone who had assembled the whole of it into a single mental model, which was more than most of Eddy's casual fans usually demonstrated.
It was the specificity of her knowledge about
The Manikoid Intervention that gave her away.Not to Zeta. Zeta was watching and cataloguing and trying to avoid feeling jealous about the way Eddy's eyes stayed locked onto Systolina. But Eddy — Eddy had been writing about the bumpha and the pek for thirty years. He had written Manny into stories in which Manny took a dozen different forms while attending to her Interventions on Earth. He had written Manny as a marine biologist, as a retired librarian, as a graduate student in ecology, always with the same duality of character: the cover identity and the underlying bumpha. He now suspected that Systolina must actually be Manny, playing another one of her roles.
The surface performance was excellent. The content beneath it was not quite right for a human fan. It had the quality of knowledge that had not been acquired but possessed — not the knowledge of a reader who had assembled it over years and could describe where she had encountered each piece, but the knowledge of someone for whom it was simply omniscient.
"The scene in The
Manikoid Intervention ," Systolina said, "where the copy of Tyhry learns for the first time that she has been made into a replicoid... you've written that kind of scene before. Nyrtia doesn't over-explain what's happened. She just tells Tyhry that she is an artificial life-form, and then waits for the poor girl to accept her new existence as an exile from Earth."Eddy glanced at Zeta who was at the far end of the table and then he leaned close to Systolina and asked quietly so that only she could hear his words, "Why are you admitting that you know what I haven't published yet?"
"You read from
The Manikoid Intervention today.""I read a small passage. You've seen more."
"Yes." She looked at him steadily, completely unabashed.
"I emailed several chapters to my daughter," Eddy said. "Did you hack my mail account?"
Systolina said nothing and for a time just ate while another fan asked Eddy a question.
Later, the restaurant staff had lost its patience and forced the group to depart and free up the big table for another arriving group. Walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Systolina, Eddy told her, "I thought you were Manny."
"I know."
"You're not."
"No." She smiled like someone who found the situation genuinely interesting. "I'm not. But I am — like Manny — very interested in what you're writing and why. And I would very much like, if you'll have me, to see where you work."
Zeta had finished paying the bill and saying good-night to the other fans who still hovered around the entrance of the restaurant. Zeta was watching Eddy and Sytolina with the close attention and now while taking Addy's arm she heard Systolina's proposal.
"Casanay," Zeta said.
"If I may."
Zeta looked at Eddy. Eddy looked at Systolina. " Systolina seems to know a great deal about what happens in
The Manikoid Intervention ," he said to Zeta. He asked Systolina, "How does it end?"Systolina considered Eddy's question with a seriousness that seemed, to Zeta, entirely genuine. Systolina gave an answer to Eddy that was intended for Zeta. "I know how I hope it ends," she said. "Whether it ends that way depends partly on you. And partly on Tyhry. Which is why I wanted to see the place where you do your writing. I want to see the magic as it happens!"
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At their hotel, Eddy and Zeta discussed Systolina. "She knows too much," he said, finally. "I accused her of hacking into my emails."
Zeta asked, "Did she confess?"
"She has a talent for not answering challenging questions."
"She's a smooth operator."
Eddy turned this over. "If Systolina has a source that provides her with information about what happens inside Casanay then I'd guess it must be Marda."
"I'd have to agree. Marda is a mystery.” Zeta paused than asked. “Have you noticed how much time she spends with Anthony?"
"I have already written a character named Systolina into
The Manikoid Intervention ," Eddy said, slowly. "An artificial life-form who operates in the Hierion Domain, at Observer Base. She's an agent for the Phari, with patience and planning on a time scale that matches that of Manny."Zeta did not say what she was thinking, which was characteristic of Zeta and which Eddy had, after more than twenty years, learned to read as agreement. "Systolina wants something from you or maybe Tyhry," she said. "Could Tyhry's new experimental results be so important they'd become a target for technological espionage and bribery?”
"That seems unlikely. There's only a fringe group of biologists who work on the origin of life. It's not like biomedical research that can be worth billions to drug companies."
Zeta turned out the light beside their bed. “I can't believe you agreed to meet her for breakfast.”
“ I told Systolina that I needed to speak to you.”
“ You should have just said no.”
But in the morning, when Eddy and Zeta met Systolina for breakfast, Eddy invited her to visit Casanay. At the highway turnoff for the Casanay driveway, Zeta slowed the car and interrupted Systolina who was arguing with Eddy over some minor plot point in one of Eddy's old novels. At breakfast he had bluntly accused Systolina of being a crazy nut job who had adopted the name of one of his characters. Systolina has simply laughed and they'd been pals ever since, discussing his novels during the whole drive from Flagstaff back home.
"Regretting that you invited her?" Zeta asked Eddy.
Eddy chuckled. “I'm having fun. Systolina knows how to stoke my ego by demonstrating how well she knows my stories.”
"I think," Zeta said carefully, "that she was going to end up here regardless. Having her arrive as a guest is better than the alternative." She turned onto the unpaved driveway.
Eddy added, "She
is entertaining."Zeta sighed. "I just fear she is not what she appears to be."
Systolina told Zeta, "I have read every novel your husband ever wrote. I just want to see how he does it. Creates his stories. Nothing more need be said."
Ahead, Casanay came into view.
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Inside Casanay, Tyhry was at her workbench in the basement, reviewing the results of the most recent ribozyme reaction runs. The data was, as it had been for seven days running, interesting. Arrestingly, inexplicably, obstinately interesting. Every step in the experiment had worked on the first attempt. The ligase modification had integrated cleanly. The aggregating hydrophobic peptides were stabilizing the PTC ribozyme activity in exactly the manner Marda had predicted. The experimental design was sound. The reagents were clean. The controls were correctly constructed. Why shouldn't it work? Tyhry had enough experience to know that the Lab Gods were always watching and eager to throw monkey wrenches into every experiment.
She had, Tyhry thought privately, the data set she had hoped to generate by the end of the year, and they had generated it in a week. She was nervous about the speed of it, the clean linearity of it, the sense of a path to discovery that had been swept clear before she arrived on it.
A week ago she had written down her hypothesis that someone had designed the first ribozymes on Earth. That the RNA seeds had been engineered. Somehow her confidence in the validity of that hypothesis seemed linked to the success of each day's lab results and with each passing day that crazy hypothesis about the Origin of Life returned to Tyhry’s thoughts and seemed even more difficult to dismiss.
Above her, she could hear voices in the great room — her parents, and someone else. A third voice she didn't recognize, female, with an energy to it that reached through the floor.
She left Marda to the task of entering the latest data into the notebook software and went upstairs to welcome home her parents and meet the visitor.
End Chapter 8
images to be added
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