Will the Real Phari Agent Please Stand Up

On the road to Casanay.

Below on this blog page is my version (4,000 words) of Chapter 9 of the science fiction story "The RNA Seeds". To make my version of Chapter 8, I started with the a 4,900 word-long first draft that had been generated by Claude (see my previous blog post). This was one of the rare occasions where my version was shorter. Claude rambled on aimlessly about irrelevant things like Zeta's gardens and Anthony's cooking. Claude has some endlessly-repeated stock phrases such as "quality of attention" and "the particular quality" that I'm tempted to order Claude to stop using, but I fear that such an order from me might cause Claude's wheels to fall off. I thought we had agreed to end Chapter 9 with Systolina just having shown Eddy the RNA feature of the Viewer, but Claude seemingly found it hard to bring the chapter to an abrupt close.

Chapter 9 of “The RNA Seeds”: The Phari Factor (Chap. 1)(Chap. 2)(Chap. 3)(Chap. 4)(Chap. 5)(Chap. 6)(Chap. 7)(Chap. 8) 

Tyhry was already intently tuned-in to the third voice before she reached the top of the basement stairs — a bright, carrying sound that had the quality of someone who was younger than the residents of Casanay. She emerged from the stairwell into the hallway and found that Systolina had already made herself at home in the way that certain people do immediately upon crossing a threshold, not through any presumption but through an instinctive calibration to the available space.

Systolina reading to Eddy.

Systolina was standing in the center of the great room with one of Eddy's novels open in her hands — not her own copy but a book she had lifted from the shelf beside the workstation — reading a passage aloud to Eddy with the uninhibited pleasure of someone reading their favorite part of a favorite book. Eddy was watching her with the expression he wore when he encountered a reader who had found something in his prose that he himself had forgotten putting there. Zeta was standing slightly apart from both of them; puzzled over Systolina's intentions.

Two of the cats had already made judgments. Pepper had retreated to the top of the bookcase in the corner, from which height he was conducting a forensic examination of the newcomer. Luna had gone directly to Systolina's ankles and was conducting a thorough olfactory investigation of the visitor's shoes, which appeared to satisfy her, because she then sat down on Systolina's left foot and waited to see what happened next.

Systolina did not interrupt her reading to look down at the cat. She reached down without breaking her recitation and scratched Luna behind the ear with a precision that suggested long practice, which was itself interesting, Tyhry thought. Luna went immediately into the specific boneless posture she adopted when truly satisfied with something.

Systolina and Luna.

Tyhry had come upstairs to welcome her parents home and she had not expected to find herself watching a stranger read her father's prose to him with the apparent casualness of someone who had been doing it for years.

Systolina finished the passage and looked up and saw Tyhry in the hallway entrance and her expression transformed immediately into the uncomplicated brightness of someone who had been told to expect a person and was genuinely pleased that the person had arrived. "Hi Tyhry," she said. "I'm thrilled to meet the flesh and blood version of the Tyhry who Eddy writes into his stories."

Systolina handed Eddy the book. He opened his mouth, but Zeta put her hand on his arm and he said nothing.

"Eddy's fantasy versions of me," Tyhry said, "are a subject I have made my peace with," As she crossed the great room and extended her hand. "Tyhry Watson."

Systolina did not shake Tyhry's hand but used it to pull Tyhry into a tight embrace. "I'm Systolina, but you can call me 'Sis'."

"The name of a character in..." Tyhry said. Tyhry looked at her father. Eddy had his eyes locked onto Systolina and showed no hint of being surprised.

Anthony appeared from the kitchen and looked at the luggage there on the floor which included Systolina's large suitcase.

Zeta told Anthony, “Let's put Systolina in the Blue Room."

Systolina turned to look at Anthony with quick, assessing attention. For a fraction of a second — long enough to notice, short enough to dismiss — something moved across her face that was not the superfan enthusiasm she had been deploying since her arrival. Then it was gone, replaced by a warm smile that Anthony received without visible reaction.

Anthony nodded and carried the suitcase down the hallway. Tyhry watched him go.

Tyhry and Systolina in the Blue Room.

"I'll give you the deluxe tour of Casanay, starting with the Blue Room," Tyhry said to Systolina.

"I would love that," Systolina said. She took hold of Tyhry's hand and fell into step beside Tyhry as they went down the hallway. As they passed the door that led to the basement stairs she said, "I can't wait to see your laboratory."

Tyhry was tempted to take Systolina down to meet Marda, but she simply followed Anthony to the Blue Room. She asked Systolina, "You know the floor plan of Casanay?"

"Eddy thinks I'm his Super Fan and I've been stroking his ego, but he's not why I'm here." Systolina gazed at Tyhry with a radiance that melted Tyhry's heart. “I know all about Casanay... and you.”

Systolina stepped into the Blue Room, which was a suite of rooms at the east end of the house that got good morning light and had a view across the garden toward the desert. Anthony had already set the suitcase inside the door and was heading back towards the kitchen to complete preparations for lunch. Tyhry showed off each of the rooms in the suite and Systolina moved through them like someone who had been in them previously. She spent several seconds looking at the view across Zeta's garden with an expression of what appeared to be genuine appreciation.

Systolina seemed not to want to let go of Tyhry's hand and guided Tyhry back to the hallway. When they passed her suitcase she said, "I'll unpack later. I hope my rags don't offend your mother."

"I've got tons of my old clothes that I out-grew. I bet some of it would fit you, if you don't mind hand-me-downs." Tyhry was watching Systolina with the same careful attention she brought to novel experimental results.

They went back to the core of the house. Tyhry showed Systolina the library, the little movie theater, the dining room and then they cut through the kitchen where Anthony was beginning lunch preparations.

Tyhry showed off the rest of the west wing. They walked past the door to Anthony's suite of rooms. "Anthony has been with your parents longer than you have," Systolina said, as they moved along the long hallway.

"He keeps Casanay sailing smoothly," Tyhry said. “He even takes care of equipment repairs for the lab.”

"Amazingly versatile," Systolina said. Her voice was perfectly pleasant. "Either Zeta pays him extravagantly or he has some non-monetary reason to stay here decade after decade."

Tyhry chose not to respond to this. She opened the door at the end of the west wing hallway and they went out into the backyard.

Zeta's gardens formed a crescent around the backyard patio and pool. An extensive series of raised beds and established shrubs had been installed over the course of thirty years of Zeta's careful attention. The pool occupied a flagstone terrace along with a hot tub. The late morning air was hot. Two quail were working their way along the base of the garden wall.

Systolina stopped at the edge of the pool and looked into the depths near the diving board. "Your father swims here," she said, quietly. "Late in the day when the sunlight is past the burn hours. He takes care of himself. He's in great shape for his age."

Tyhry stood beside Systolina and did not say anything. The quail had reached the corner of the garden wall and turned and went back the way they had come.

"I want to ask you something," Tyhry said.

"I know."

"You are using the name of a character in the story my father is writing. A positronic robot who resides at Observer Base in the Hierion Domain." She watched Systolina's face. "Is this some kind of fandom thing?"

Systolina turned from the desert and looked at Tyhry with an expression that was full of amusement. "You should ask Eddy," she said, "why he is using me as a character in The Manikoid Intervention ." 

"I'm asking you."

"Look, I had the name long before Eddy adopted it." Systolina smiled, and this smile was different from the superfan variety — quieter, with more history in it. "I think you already know how that's possible, but you don't want to believe it. You're not entirely sure you want to face the truth."

Tyhry reading Chapter 3.
Image generated by Leonardo.

“I love a puzzle.” Tyhry looked at the desert, because it was easier to look at the desert than to look at Systolina's face, which seemed to taunt Tyhry in its easy amusement. "I'm going to have to re-read Chapter 3 of The Manikoid Intervention," she said. "I'll figure out who you really are and why you are here."

Systolina finally let go of Tyhry's hand and made a sound that was not quite a laugh — too fond for a laugh, too brief for anything more. "I don't want Zeta to think you sent me those chapters," she said. Her voice had dropped slightly, not to a whisper but to the volume of a conversation intended for two. "I have friends who have access to your father's computer and everything he writes. They asked me to visit Casanay, and they let me read The Manikoid Intervention when I agreed to come." A pause. "I've already told Eddy that I know all about his work, and he seems to understand. He likes having someone who really knows his stories. I'm his Super Fan!"

Tyhry brought her gaze back from the desert. The word 'friends' had landed in her mind with the particular weight of a word that is being used to mean something more specific than its ordinary usage. She had been a scientist long enough to know that imprecision in word choice was usually either accidental or deliberate, and Systolina did not seem like a person given to accidents. "For now I'll play your game and pretend that you are a nutty sci-fi fan," Tyhry said. She let a beat pass. "You are also fun. I'm glad you're here." Another beat, shorter, during which she surprised herself with what she said next. "I've often wished I had a little sister."

Systolina looked at her with an expression of such swift and genuine warmth that Tyhry found it almost destabilizing. "That's why you should call me 'sis'," Systolina said. Then, before Tyhry could respond, she turned back toward the house with the energy of someone who has concluded one portion of a visit and is ready for the next. "Now stop delaying and show me your laboratory."

__

The basement laboratory was a different world than the rest of Casanay; a room in which careful work was ongoing. The sequencer endlessly humming with more samples than it could keep up with, sample racks in ice-cold trays, the confocal microscope with its dust cover holding stray cat hairs in an electrostatic grip. Marda at the workbench setting up the day's ribozyme runs with the focused efficiency that Tyhry had come to expect. Pepper the cat was on top of the sequencer housing, apparently asleep, though with Pepper it was difficult to be certain.

Marda looked up when Tyhry came down the stairs. She began to say something about the previous night's results. Then Marda noticed Systolina coming down behind Tyhry.

What happened next took approximately thirty seconds and left Tyhry feeling amazed by it all. Marda stopped speaking. She set down the pipetter that was in her hand with the deliberate, unhurried care of someone completing a physical action that requires full attention, and then she turned to face Systolina with a directness that was not Marda's directness. Marda's attention, in Tyhry's experience, arrived in oblique angles, approaching things from the side, the side where cautious thought came before action. What Tyhry saw now arrived head-on, across a distance that seemed to evaporate between Marda's place at the workbench and Systolina at the foot of the stairwell.

"You are not needed here," Marda said. Her voice was Marda's voice in every feature except one: the quality of certainty in it was absolute, coming from a place that the biological Marda, who was careful and precise about what she knew and what she was guessing, had never spoken from.

Systolina glided with the momentum from descending the stairs right over into Marda's personal space. "What I should not be," she said, "is standing idly by while the Phari are blamed for an Intervention they have no part in."

"The Phari interest and meddling in bumpha affairs is what brings them grief." Marda's voice was level and without inflection. "They are intrigued by bumpha technology. Phari efforts will lead to nothing."

"You have been pretending to have a Phari connection. You can fool Anthony Kasty but not the Phari," Systolina said, and now a thread of genuine indignation found its way into her voice, precise and controlled. "The pek Overseer of Earth will eventually decide on the role of the Phari here at Casanay. I am here to make clear, to anyone who is watching, that the Phari are not the guilty, not directing what is happening here inside Casanay." She looked at Marda steadily. "The technology you are demonstrating to the pek Observer does not belong to the Phari. Stop suggesting that it does."

"Your objection," Marda said, "has been heard, but it is irrelevant."

"If you insist on teaching the application of RNA to the pek then I'll teach it to Eddy," Systolina said. She looked at Tyhry for one moment — a glance that was brief but held something in it that Tyhry could not fully parse, a quality of assessment combined with something that might, in a different context, have been described as apology — and then she went back up the stairs, her footsteps easy and unhurried.

The basement was then very quiet.

Marda turned back to her workbench and picked up the pipetter she had set down. "Almost done," she said. "I'll get this second run going before lunch." She said this in exactly the voice in which she had always said everything when speaking to Tyhry. She did not look at the stairwell. She did not look at Tyhry. She had the focused, present quality of someone who had been engaged in this particular task for the past twenty minutes and expected to continue being engaged in it for the next twenty.

Tyhry stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked at Marda. She looked at the position of the pipette in Marda's hand and then at the foam rack of samples in front of her, and she understood with a particular cold clarity that Marda was not resuming her work. From Marda's perspective and within her thought stream, she had not paused her work.

Tyhry said, "Marda."

"The second run," Marda said. "I'll be interested to see if my prediction is proved out."

From the direction of the sequencer housing, Pepper opened one eye, conducted a brief investigation of the room, and closed it again.

Tyhry looked up the stairwell. She looked back at Marda. She went to her own workbench and sat down on her stool and opened her old fashioned paper research notebook, the one she used to write down her wild ideas that amused Marda.

She had read The Manikoid Intervention's first three chapters. In the third chapter, Manny's zeptozoan had been sent into the past and integrated with Tyhry2's own zeptite endosymbiont, and Tyhry2 had not revealed its presence. The thoughts of the zeptozoan had not been spoken aloud, and its presence inside Tyhry2 had not been detectable from the outside.

Tyhry sat at her workbench and was very careful not to look at Marda for the next several minutes while she wrote down an account of what she had just witnessed.

__

As was often the case when Marda and Tyhry emerged from the basement for lunch, which was rare, they were late to the table. Anthony had made cold poached salmon with herbs and a grain salad and an arrangement of vegetables that Eddy, Zeta and Systolina were already consuming with gusto. Systolina ate with the appreciation of someone for whom the specific composition of the meal was less relevant than the quality of the conversation available at the table, which was almost immediately occupied entirely by herself and Eddy.

Eddy had the pleased expression he wore when a fan was talking to him affectionately about his writing. "In The Manikoid Intervention ," Eddy said, "the character of Systolina is introduced to Tyhry at Observer Base. Nyrtia introduces Systolina to the copy of Tyhry who has just been exiled from Earth. I wrote that scene a week or so before I met you."

"I know," Systolina said. She was serving herself more grain salad.

"I want to understand," Eddy continued, carefully, the way he was careful when he believed he was close to something important, "how a person can be in two places at once. In my story, the character of Systolina is a positronic robot who works out of the remnants of the Eternity space-time bubble at Observer Base in the Hierion Domain." He said this in the careful tone of a man who has spent thirty years writing about alien technologies and is fully aware of how this sentence sounds. "In this Reality, you are sitting across from me at lunch eating Anthony's poached salmon."

"It's excellent salmon," Systolina said.

"Thank you," Anthony said, from his place at the table.

"Dad," Tyhry said.

Eddy spoke without looking at Tyhry. His eyes seemed locked on Systolina. "Yes?"

She had been trying to find the opening for this since sitting down. She looked at Systolina, who stopped talking and reached for her water glass and took a long drink that created space for Tyhry to speak. Tyhry noted that Systolina was actually capable of playing the fantasy role of 'sis', Tyhry's imaginary little sister.

"I need to talk to you," Tyhry said to her father.

"Of course." Eddy nodded with the automatic agreeableness of a man who has not yet registered the specific weight of the request. "I'm going to show Systolina where I write... how I work, but you and I could have a swim later in the afternoon."

"Fine," Tyhry said. "The pool."

Systolina then asked Eddy another question about The Manikoid Intervention and Eddy turned his full attention back to her and the lunch continued.

Zeta, who had been feeling cut off from Eddy ever since breakfast, refilled Tyhry's water glass without being asked. Tyhry looked at her mother.

Zeta said nothing. She just poured the water, silently sharing with her daughter the feeling that Systolina had swooped in like a bird of prey and scooped up Eddy and flown off with him.

Tyhry looked across the table at Systolina and thought about the confrontation between Systolina and Marda she had seen in the basement. Tyhry thought about the first three chapters of The Manikoid Intervention and thought about the seven consecutive days in which every experiment had worked. She thought about the hypothesis that aliens had long ago provided Earth with the RNA seeds that were the origin of life for her world. She thought about Marda picking up the pipette exactly where she had left it.

She had told herself: as long as I don't say anything to other scientists about aliens seeding life on Earth, I will be safe. She had told herself: the Tyhry in the story was exiled because she revealed dangerous information to Anthony. I will not reveal dangerous information to Anthony. I will keep my head down. I will publish my results. I will have a career.

Across the table, Systolina was explaining to Eddy the precise functional difference between two of his fictional technologies for “seeing” the future: a Phari Simulation System and a bumpha Reality Viewer. Eddy was nodding slowly and his eyes had the brightness they got when a fan found something in his work that he had believed was subtle.

Tyhry thought: maybe it does not really matter what I say to other scientists . The aliens are already inside Casanay. They are at this table. One of them may be inside my laboratory assistant. It might not matter what I say. The important thing might only be what I've been given, and maybe, my entire life, I have been given everything, and none of it was given without a purpose, and I don't know what that purpose is and I don't know if I want to know.

__

After lunch, Systolina has skipped excitedly into the great room. Eddy was still carrying the energy of the conversation with Systolina like a man who had drunk something stimulating and was not ready to put the cup down. Zeta latched onto Eddy."A moment," she said.

Eddy paused, his eyes still on Systolina who had gone into the great room.

"She knows things she should not know," Zeta said, without preamble.

"I know," Eddy said.

"She is performing for you. Giving you what you find most engaging in a reader, Eddy. She has done substantial research on you and knows exactly what you respond to."

"I know," Eddy said. Finally, he got his eyes off of Systolina for a moment. "Zeta. I know all of this."

Zeta looked at him for a moment. "And you're going to take her to your workstation anyway. Show her your unpublished work."

"Why not? She knows it already."

Zeta let out a breath that was not quite a sigh — it was a sound that existed in the territory between acceptance and exasperation, which was a territory she had spent a considerable portion of her adult life in. "Then at least find out," she said, "what she actually wants."

"That," Eddy said, "is exactly what I intend to do."

He went to the great room. Systolina was at the bookcase, running her fingertips along the spines of his novels in the order of their publication, and she turned when he entered with the natural ease of someone who had been waiting pleasantly for him and was genuinely pleased that he had arrived.

"Come look at something," Eddy said, and settled into his chair at the workstation.

Systolina pulled up the chair and sat down while on the windowsill, Trib was positioned in anticipation of the afternoon light. Eddy gestured at the screen. His Manikoid Intervention manuscript was open, the working draft of Chapter 8, the cursor sitting in the middle of a sentence he had not yet finished. There in the menu bar, the word Viewer sat between two of the standard application menus.

"I suppose your 'friends' have shown this to you. Is this why you are here?"

Systolina glanced suspiciously at the nearby cat and replied, “I keep wondering if Manny will drop by. She failed to explain to you all of the features of this Viewer.”

"I want to know," Eddy said, "how a young woman sitting across from me at lunch can end up at Observer Base in the Hierion Domain." He said this with the equanimity of a man who has been writing about characters who got exiled to Observer Base for decades and found the idea of Systolina facing that fate more interesting than alarming. Eddy activated the Viewer.

Systolina looked at the Viewer interface for a moment. Then she looked at Eddy. "Manny didn't show you the RNA function," she said. "That surprises me."

"Manny," Eddy said carefully, "probably arranged for you to do that."

Systolina shrugged, in the way of someone confirming a hypothesis that they had mostly expected to be confirmed. "Let me show you," she said, and reached for the mouse.

She clicked the RNA button.

The display screen filled with a complex network of linkages and probability values on each possible path into the future. These were the Reality Node Assembler values that Anthony and Marda had most recently been exploring. Then Systolina used the mouse to move the cursor to one particular linkage and right-clicked.

A pop-up window appeared that described how this particular path to the future might become possible. "This is what I wanted to show you. You can use the RNA function to select among possible futures."

"Show me," he said.

Systolina knew only what she had learned from watching Marda teaching Anthony to use the RNA. Now the race was on. A race to Reality Change. Who would get there first: she and Eddy or Anthony and Marda? The fate of Tyhry and the future of Earth both hung in the balance.

End Chapter 9

Next: plans for Chapter 10 of "The RNA Seeds".