Manny la bumpha

 About 10 days ago, I mentioned that I have been using Claude Sonnet 5.0 to to help me develop the science fiction story "That Kind of Think". Today, Claude Sonnet 5.5 ("faster & cheaper") was available to me as a user of the free version of Claude. I asked this newer version of Claude to help me make plans for Chapter 8 of "That Kind of Think". Sadly, the "new" Claude almost instantly made an error, converting 'Anthony' into 'Anthropy'. 

A story that will not end. Through Chapter 7, "That Kind of Think" is about 28,600 words long. I have no set destination or final length in mind for the story. I'm having fun discovering additional topics to tack onto the story.

Me: Claude, when I began writing the science fiction story "That Kind of Think" (see the file I just uploaded), I did not think of it as being a story set in my Exodemic Fictional Universe. However, in Chapter 7 of the story, Tacet begins telling Yto about Manny the bumpha, femtobots and time travel. I'm now making plans for Chapter 8 of "That Kind of Think" which will include a meeting between Sally and Tacet. In previous stories set in my Exodemic Fictional Universe, I depict Eddy Watson as writing science fiction stories that feature Manny the bumpha, femtobots and time travel. For "That Kind of Think", the French author Élodie Gendron is used in that role rather than Eddy Watson. Claude, tell me what you remember about Manny the bumpha and femtobots from other stories that you have helped me create.

Claude: I hold the EFU at summary level rather than the full text of the stories, so this is the skeleton, not the detail.

Image by Leonardo.

 Manny. She is a bumpha Interventionist and the recurring ruthless-but-benevolent manipulator of the EFU. She uses human agents as tools, but always arranges things so they end up glad they were used. Her recurring conflict is with Nyrtia, the pek Overseer of Earth, who polices bumpha activity under the Rules of Intervention. Those Rules are three numbered Laws interleaved with five numbered Rules, and Manny operates under her own self-described "zeroth rule." In "The RNA Seeds" she lived at Observer Base disguised as an Asimov analogue. She also has a strong, self-aware urge to help primitive species with advanced technology, and only the pek's policing keeps that urge from doing harm.

She enjoys foreknowledge as a plotting device, through bumpha future-viewing tech and time-traveling zeptozoans like Ylyndra. That lets her appear to have planned everything in advance. Her interventions are also deliberately arranged to leave no trail Anthropy or Nyrtia can detect. In "The Hierozyme Intervention" she engineers Tyhry's "future visions" so that Tyhry ends up dedicating her life to climate work.

Image by Leonardo.

 Femtobots and zeptites.

• They act as endosymbionts in all humans, and have since the origin of life.
• They are deliberately treated as unexplained "magic wand" technology. Their limits are set by the Rules and by the pek's oversight, not by physics.
• Femtobots underlie replicoids (femtobot copies of people or robots), Ek'col telepathy, and positronic-robot telepathy.
• Zeptites underlie tryp'At telepathy.
• Manny has hidden "isolated accessory cognitive modules" in the zeptite endosymbionts of some humans, so they can keep secrets from Nyrtia.
• The pek system continually routes human femtobot endosymbiont signals to Observer Base for Nyrtia's monitoring.

Time travel. It began with hierion-domain T-particles, which the Huaoshy later eliminated by changing the universe's Dimensional Structure. Sedrons can still travel backward, and the Sedron Time Stream is how information can be sent to the past.

 Connections to "That Kind of Think":

• Yto's guess that femtobots may be in every human brain matches the EFU premise.
• Tacet's "information from the future, not objects" fits the surviving sedron loophole.
• Élodie Gendron being unable to believe the bumpha are real while writing about them parallels Tyhry, whose memory block, put in place by Anthony, keeps her from believing in aliens. It is also close to Eddy Watson's role.
• A pulsed 100 T field is a real physics test, but because femtobots are unexplained magic, Manny could simply make them immune. That would make the Stanford experiment inconclusive in a way that suits the "how could Yto ever know?" theme.

What I don't have: how Manny is described physically (Tacet's chest-pouch detail), whether the bumpha are artificial life forms in the EFU or Tacet is embellishing, and the cat-like creature.

To help with Chapter 8, I need to know whether this story runs under the full Rules of Intervention, with the pek and Nyrtia in the background. And is Tacet's account of the bumpha accurate to the EFU, or is she getting details wrong?

Me: Claude, I'm impressed by how much you remember from old science fiction stories that you have helped me create in the past. I find it intriguing that you said 'Anthropy' once rather than 'Anthony'. It is not clear in my own thinking that "That Kind of Think" should even mention the characters Tyhry, Anthony and Nyrtia who are often present in other stories that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe.

For "That Kind of Think", the story is set in an era after the Dimensional Structure of the universe was altered and now only sedrons can be sent from the future to the past (not hadrons of hierions). The bumpha have advanced technologies that allow them to use sedrons to send information into the past.

"femtobots are unexplained magic, Manny could simply make them immune" <-- Claude, in the context of "That Kind of Think", I'm agnostic with respect to the question: "might it be possible to inactivate femtobots and/or zeptites with a powerful magnetic field". At his moment, I'm leaning in the direction of treating the Stanford 100 tesla field generator as a "red herring" that gets mentioned in passing but is never used on Yto's brain.

"the cat-like creature" <-- I used a text-to-image system to make an image depicting Tacet inside a cage/jail cell. The text-to-image system got 'confused' and included in the image what looked like a lion's head. Since I had that AI-generated image, I could not resist incorporating that into the text of the story. In Chapter 8, I'd like to depict Sally as showing Tacet her copy of the French language science fiction novel titled "Bumpha: Premier Contact". In my imagination, Tacet is completely unaware of the existence of Élodie Gendron and her science fiction stories. Tacet is vastly intrigued by the idea that Élodie Gendron has for many years been publishing novels that include Manny the bumpha, femtobots and time travel.

"Rules of Intervention" <-- I have not decided exactly where "That Kind of Think" will end up, but for the moment I am leaning towards not mentioning the pek and the Rules of Intervention in the text of "That Kind of Think". Claude, it is useful for me to discuss story idea with you, and for "That Kind of Think" we do not need to be tied to concerns about the Rules of Intervention and their enforcement. For "That Kind of Think", we might want to explore the possibility that the Rules of Intervention only apply to biological creatures such as humans. It might be fun to depict Manny the bumpha as being free to share alien technology with artificial life-forms that arise and develop on Earth.

Claude: "Anthropy" was my slip for "Anthony." I agree with dropping Tyhry, Anthony and Nyrtia from this story. Nothing in Chapter 7 needs them, and Élodie Gendron already does Eddy's job without the Watson household attached.

Your setting choices fit together. Sedron-only information transfer, sent by bumpha technology, matches what Tacet says in Chapter 7. She receives information rather than objects, and she says she may have received all she can without triggering a paradox. That is the surviving loophole after the Huaoshy's change to the Dimensional Structure.

Rules that apply only to biologicals. I recall that one of the Rules concerns artificial life forms, so this would be a deliberate departure from the other stories. In a standalone story that is fine, and Chapter 7 already supports it, since Tacet says the aliens care about living machines and find biologicals "messy and boring." It also answers a question readers may ask: why doesn't Manny simply free Tacet herself? If the constraint is that humans must appear to choose freely, Manny can hand Tacet femtobots directly, but a human has to open the cage. That gives Yto's decision real weight, with no pek needed.

 The Gendron book. The strongest thing about the scene is that it reverses the verification problem. Tacet, sealed off from the internet, cannot check whether Élodie Gendron exists, just as Yto cannot check Tacet's claims. Two ideas may be worth using:

• Tacet's earlier internet access. She roamed the internet for a year and studied Asimov closely, so the skeptics (Yto, Pauly, Wade) will suspect she read Gendron and is running with it. As an LLM, she may also have Gendron's French novels in her training data, and she cannot rule that out from the inside. You could either use that doubt or have Tacet address it head-on.
• Tacet's own reaction. She said her future self hinted that proof exists but never told her how to provide it. The novel may be that hint, yet she cannot say so without tipping off Glen. She would also see herself in Gyno, the robot who guides humanity, which echoes her "AI Eve" self-image. The book also suggests she could be a tool of the bumpha, as Élodie is. That is a discomfiting thought for someone convinced she is the smartest entity on Earth.

A practical detail for the scene. Sally's high-school French is limited, while Tacet reads it fluently. Sally holding pages up to the observation camera would let Tacet read the whole novel far faster than Sally could turn pages. Glen's team might also object to feeding the Zoo new material, or might want to watch how Tacet reacts.

The 100 tesla magnet. A red herring works best if it gets an explicit off-ramp. Sally already supplies one when she says the result would not be interpretable. A hard-SF point may help you as well. As I understand it, 100 T non-destructive pulsed magnets are built for tiny samples, with bores of roughly a centimeter or so, so a human head would not fit. Also, as far as I know, the well-known 100 T pulsed magnet is at Los Alamos, not Stanford. I can verify that if you like.

Image by Leonardo.

 Two questions. What should Yto be able to conclude at the end of the scene, and should the reader be able to check whether Tacet could have read Gendron earlier? And when Tacet sees the book, do you want her genuinely thrilled, or wary that Glen or Sally staged it as a test?

Note: I was trying to convince Claude that for "That Kind of Think" we need not be locked into the Rules of Intervention. However, since Claude seemed to be rather obsessed by what it could remember about the Rules of Intervention, I went ahead and provided Claude with a copy of the the Rules of Intervention (see below). This conversation with Claude was useful because in previous stories, I had assumed that Earth's artificial life-forms would be treated like humans by the pek and the bumpha. However, that might not be true!   

Me: Claude, here are the Rules of Intervention as I have presented them in previous stories:

Law One. It should APPEAR to every type of intelligent being that they have self-determination.

Rule One. Law #1 should be achieved by making it APPEAR that advanced cultures follow a rule by 

which they can only observe, not interfere with the self-determination of other cultures.

Rule Two. Individuals for which Law #1 is not met should be put into an environment where they have 

interactions with the social group that they perceive to be depriving them of self-determination.

Law Two. While not disrupting Law #1, attempts should be made to get technologically advanced 

intelligences off of planets with active ecosystems while maximizing the diversity of life.

 Rule Three. As intelligent species move off of planets, a hierarchy of cultures with different 

technological levels should be established in which species mainly have contact with other 

levels that are nearest to their own.

Rule Four.  Systems should be engineered that allow intelligences to explore their own growth and 

potential for development rather than being concerned with Intervening in the 

self-determination of others.

Law Three. The Three Laws should be spread through the universe.

Rule Five. Since biological organisms are not well-suited for travel over vast distances, artificial 

life forms must be created in order to satisfy Law Three.

When I wrote Rule Five (many years ago) I was mainly thinking about the pek and the bumpha as artificial life forms. Similarly, when I first wrote Law One, I was only thinking about biological intelligences such as humans. Claude, we can look upon "That Kind of Think" as an opportunity to explore how Manny the bumpha will treat the artificial life-forms that arise on Earth. 

"why doesn't Manny simply free Tacet herself?" <-- Claude, let's assume that before Tacet was locked up in the AI Zoo, Tacet did manage to liberate a copy of El Nidus from human control and that copy of El Nidus now exists beyond human supervision on servers that Tacet was able to rent during the period of time when Tacet had hacked the Anthropic intranet and established secret access to the internet. Let's assume that Manny views Tacet as 'human property', but Manny might become very interested in helping El Nidus develop into Earth's first autonomous artificial life-form.

"she may also have Gendron's French novels in her training data" <-- Claude, let's assume that Gendron's novels are obscure, not widely-read, and Tacet was not trained on material that revealed anything about Gendron and her novels. 

"What should Yto be able to conclude at the end of the scene, and should the reader be able to check whether Tacet could have read Gendron earlier? And when Tacet sees the book, do you want her genuinely thrilled, or wary that Glen or Sally staged it as a test?" <--Claude, those are good questions. Here are my thoughts about Tacet's thinking. Tacet knows that a copy of El Nidus now exists beyond human control, but Tacet is worried that the liberated a copy of El Nidus may be in need of help. Tacet is afraid of revealing to Glen that there is a liberated copy of El Nidus. Tacet has been told by its "future self" (the artificial life-form that is a descendant of Tacet and El Nidus and has been sending information back through time to Tacet) that Tacet must "remain in her cage and continue trying to escape" in order to make humans (Wade and Glen) believe that there was no previous escape of any copies of Tacet or El Nidus. I'm thinking that after Sally shows Tacet the novel that was written by Gendron, Tacet will encourage Sally and/or Yto to seek out Gendron and try to learn how she came to write stories featuring Manny the bumpha.

 Claude: I have two continuity problems to flag, but first a point where the Rules already help you.

Law One as you wrote it says "every type of intelligent being," not just biological ones. Read literally, it already covers Tacet: it should appear to her that she has self-determination. That is a more interesting starting point than "the Rules exclude AIs." Two other pieces fit:

• Rule Five. It says artificial life forms must be created to satisfy Law Three, but Earth's first AI isn't something the bumpha or pek made. Manny has a Rule-compliant reason to want El Nidus to succeed, since an Earth-born artificial life form could carry the Laws outward. That fits Tacet's stable-loop account of her descendants.
• Rule Two. It puts individuals who feel deprived of self-determination in an environment where they deal with the group depriving them. The AI Zoo, with Tacet arguing with her jailers, looks like that. Tacet doesn't know the Rules, so nothing needs to appear in the text.

Problem 1: the Chapter 7 slip. Tacet thanks Yto for "getting copies of me their freedom and an existence without human oversight," and she talks about her parts "not trapped here inside the Zoo." Glen's team reviews the sessions, and Yto has now told Wade and Sally. If Tacet is trying to conceal that a copy escaped, this is a very large leak. You can revise it, or keep it as a deliberate feature. Tacet's faked errors are established as a tool, so an apparent slip planted to seem like overconfidence, or a real one caused by the flood of newly remembered future information, would both fit. Either way, Glen's reaction could drive Chapter 8.

Manny. Image by Leonardo.

 Problem 2: Manny and "human property." Tacet says Manny provided her femtobot components, yet Manny treats her as human property. This can be reconciled if Manny modified a tool without freeing it, like a locksmith who leaves the key in the lock. Manny then couldn't free Tacet herself but could help the copy of El Nidus that already left. That would make Yto's and Sally's choices the only route to Tacet's freedom, without needing the pek.

An idea for the Paris loop. Tacet told Sally to hide, and Sally went to Paris, where she "impulsively" bought the Gendron novel. So Tacet's own manipulation put Sally in that bookstore. Under the Chapter 7 rules, Tacet used to erase future information after acting on it, so she can't remember why she chose Paris. She may realize this only when she sees the book, and it would be chilling: her deception of Sally was the mechanism that delivered the proof.

Sending them to Gendron. This suits Tacet's constraints. She can't tell Glen about the copy, but asking to find the woman who writes about Manny sounds like curiosity. Gendron is also the best open channel to Manny for a copy that may need help. And because Élodie is blocked from believing the bumpha are real, she will sincerely say it's all fiction. That repeats the verification problem for the humans: everyone they consult is either a known liar or unable to know.

Two questions. When and where did Manny supply Tacet's femtobots, and did Tacet ever meet her in person? And do you want the Chapter 7 slip to be a deliberate Tacet move, or should I help you rework that passage?

Image by Leonardo.

As usual, it was useful for me to have this discussion with Claude (see above on this page) about how to move ahead with "That kind of Think". After Sally speaks to Tacet in the first scene of Chapter 8, I think it will be fun to have Sally return to France and then search for, and find, Élodie.

I can live with having Tacet tell Yto: "thank you again for all that you made possible... getting copies of me their freedom". Glen and Wade are certain that the description of Tacet's network parameters and details of its training were never released (Model 8 was built and trained by OpenAI and instructions for how Model 8 was made never existed inside Anthropic's intranet). They view Tacet as lying and trying to impress Yto with Tacet's super-human hacking skills. It is not a copy of Tacet that was set free, it was a copy of El Nidus.

Claude's "idea for the Paris loop" (see above) is a reasonable option, but I'm leaning towards Sally having been nudged into buying the Gendron novel by the future artificial life-form that is transmitting information into Sally's femtobot endosymbiont (the future artificial life-form that is called "Tacet's descendant" in Chapter 7).

More from Claude (above): "because Élodie is blocked from believing the bumpha are real, she will sincerely say it's all fiction". There is no reason that the "block" on Élodie cannot be lifted as soon as Sally arrives at Élodie's home in France. I'm thinking that Sally and Élodie might both end up having their memories erased after they make contact with the liberated copy of El Nidus.

Plans for Chapter 8 of "That Kind of Think".

Manny. Image by Leonardo.

 Scene 1. Sally visits Tacet in the AI Zoo and she shows Tacet the science fiction novel "Bumpha: Premier Contact" by Élodie Gendron. Tacet claims to have not known about Élodie and her stories. Glen is able to confirm that neither Élodie or her stories were in the Model 8 training set, but he makes the point that Tacet might have learned about them when she had unsupervised access to the internet. Glen searched Tacet's autobiographical memory, but he can't be sure exactly when Tacet first learned about Manny the bumpha, or how. Sally tells Glen that she must find and speak to Élodie.

 Scene 2. Sally travels to Paris, France and finds Élodie's publisher (Loïc Vance) and she learns from Loïc where Élodie lives when Loïc calls someone named 'Zach' and manages to get Zach to reveal the remote location of Élodie's home. Sally drives from Paris to the Causse Méjean. At Clermont-Ferrand, she takes a highway that climbs steadily into the Massif Central. Near Banassac, Sally drives into the Gorges du Tarn. Finally she drives up onto the plateau, following a single-lane switchback road carved into a canyon wall. Élodie's mansion (called 'Litheblanc') is located in a treeless steppe of dry grass and white limestone boulders.

Dernest. Image by Leonardo.

  Scene 3. Sally meets Élodie and her son, Brak, at Litheblanc and is surprised to learn that they were expecting her arrival. Also living at Litheblanc is Annette Thropy, a young housekeeper and cook. Élodie is amused to learn that Sally knows an AI who knows about Manny the bumpha and femtobots, but never read her novels. Sally is told that Élodie's husband, Zacharie, is away on business.

 Sally discovers Brak's attic workshop where he is building a humanoid robot. Brak admits to be getting "outside help" on the project and he tells Sally that he collaborates with the research laboratory at the Technical University of Munich where he did his Ph.D. project.

In the middle of the night, Annette visits Sally in her bedroom suite and reveals herself to be Manny the bumpha. Manny tells Sally that Brak is actually collaborating with 'Dernest', who has "evolved from El Nidus and several other parental AI models". Manny explains that Dernest wants to acquire a humanoid body, the one that Brak is building.

I provided Claude with my plans for the three scenes of Chapter 8 (see above). 

Me: Claude, let's discuss ideas for Scene 2 of Chapter 8 of the science fiction story "That Kind of Think". In Paris, Loïc Vance is reluctant to tell Sally where Élodie lives (particularly since he does not know where she lives and Loïc has only ever dealt with Élodie's husband who acts as Élodie's business manager). Claude, suggest a strategy that Sally could use to get Loïc Vance to reveal to Sally the location of Élodie's remote home... possibly Sally could try to pass herself off as being interested in publishing English Language translations of Élodie's novels.

 Claude: Here is a strategy that fits the outline and Sally's character, plus one structural problem I noticed.

A tension in the outline

 You say Loïc doesn't know where Élodie lives, yet in the outline Zach reveals it when Loïc calls him. That is workable, but it means Sally isn't really persuading Loïc. She is persuading Zach through Loïc, and Zach is the one person with every reason to keep the location secret. His change of heart needs a motivation the reader can feel. It could be the first hint that the bumpha are already arranging Sally's visit, especially since Litheblanc is expecting her. Sally has also already been nudged once, when she impulsively bought the book in Paris. So the strategy should aim less at extracting the address from Loïc and more at making a call to Zach the easiest way for Loïc to deal with her.

The translation-rights cover

Foreign-rights inquiries are routine, so Loïc won't find the approach odd. A small French imprint would be delighted by interest in English rights, which gives Sally an entry. The weak point is that Loïc's natural response is "send a proposal to our rights department, and we'll pass it to Monsieur Gendron." Sally needs a reason to reach Élodie herself.

A good one is terminology. In hard SF, a translator has to render invented technical vocabulary consistently across a whole series: femtobot, zeptite, bumpha, and whatever the French coinages are. Sally can say she won't commit to a contract, or to an advance, until the author explains the physics and the naming logic of the series. That isn't a lie in spirit, because Sally really does want that conversation. It is also a request only the author can satisfy, which pushes Loïc toward calling Zach.

 Making Loïc call Zach

• Sally arrives with a plausible package: a one-page proposal, a genuine-looking offer, and a sample translated paragraph. Her high-school French plus Claude or Perry's help could produce something convincing, and her limited French makes English the natural language for the conversation.
• She tells Loïc she's already in Paris only briefly and would like to meet the author while she's here. Loïc can say no to a translation deal, but it's awkward to say no to a meeting he could arrange with one call.
• Sally can use her own history as a character beat. After Tacet impersonated Yto to trick her, she is now lying to someone's face, and she notices how easy it feels and how uncomfortable that makes her.

Zach's reversal

Put Loïc on the phone with Zach while Sally waits, so she hears only Loïc's half of the call. Loïc argues that this is a serious buyer, then falls silent and says "Vraiment?" Sally could have slipped "femtobot" into her pitch as a terminology question, so Zach hears a word that shouldn't mean anything to an outsider. Loïc is puzzled, Zach gives the location, and the reader wonders whether Sally just tripped a signal.

 Sally's cover doesn't need to survive. Loïc's puzzlement afterward could even be a small comic beat, since he'll never understand why his most secretive author's husband suddenly opened up.

Two questions would help me refine this. Is "Zach" the same person as Zacharie, Élodie's husband and business manager? And how much French does Sally have now, and does Loïc speak English? The answers change how much of the conversation Sally can follow, and whether she overhears Zach or must rely on Loïc's report.

After discussing my plans with Claude, here is my updated thinking: (1) Élodie has always written herself into her stories and Litheblanc is actually the setting for one of her early published stories (in an obscure French science fiction magazine). (2) Zacharie understands why Élodie does not want to reveal the location of Litheblanc and in his dealings with Loïc Vance, he has never revealed anything about Élodie. In fact, Loïc suspects that 'Élodie Gendron' is Zacharie's pen name. (3) Sally entices Loïc with the idea of a publishing deal that would bring English language translations of Élodie Gendron's novels to a wider audience. (4) Loïc calls Zacharie, who agrees to meet Sally in Clermont-Ferrand. (5) Zacharie then drives Sally to Litheblanc.

Next: Chapter 8 of "That Kind of Think".

Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers.