2026 - The Year Reviewed

Image by ChatGPT.
The future of robots.

 Below on this blog page is my annual review for the wikifiction blog. Here in 2026, as I compose this year-in-review blog post, I'm also thinking about my tradition of starting each new year with a special blog post that is related to something that happened 100 years ago. The image shown to the right is for a re-imagined version of the film "Metropolis". Metropolis featured a humanoid robot and robots and artificial intelligence were major topics for my science fiction story writing efforts here in 2026, along with climate fiction.

January 2026. At the start of 2026, in the absence of any specific science fiction story teller born in 1926 that I wanted to investigate further, I decided to explore Amazing Stories rather than a particular person. 

Having begun the science fiction story "Downgrade" right at the end of 2025, I completed that story in January. The story features Nanovac, an artificial life-form that attains human-like consciousness in 1999. 

Image source.

In Downgrade, an acceleration of development of robotics and machine consciousness was made possible by time traveling femtozoans from the future. The story emphasizes a time loop by which Vanesy works as a researcher to develop machine consciousness, gets exiled to Observer Base by the pek, and then is converted into a zeptozoan that Manny sends into the past to help guide the develop machine consciousness.

Downgrade depicts Manny the bumpha as having the patience to iteratively cycle through thousands of Realities in order to push to earlier and earlier dates technology advances such as the development of machine intelligence and fusion power as a way to prevent global warming.

Claude helped write Downgrade and also generated a review of the story. Although Claude was my major collaborator for creating Downgrade, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT also reviewed Downgrade as did Kimi and Le Chat. The most visited blog page in January was The Awakening.

Image source.

Halfway through January, I began a new science fiction story, "The Sims", which also features zeptozoans, this time inside both robots and humans. I experimented with using six LLMs (Claude, Kimi, Le Chat, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT) to help me plan and start writing "The Sims" collaboratively. "The Sims" tries to generate some drama by depicting Tyhry as struggling with her desire to use Marda as an experimental test subject for the extraction of a zeptozoan. In the end, it is Zeta's zeptozoa that is extracted from her brain and transferred to a robot who can then begin having subjective experiences.

Speaking of Drama. Most of "The Sims" was written in January, but the final chapter did not get posted to this blog until February 24. I feel a bit strange how I deployed the character Systolina in "The Sims". I actually depicted Tyhry as dying in "The Sims", and then being 'replaced' by Systolina.

Tyhry's tryp'At phenotype.

 February 2026. The most visited blog post in February was "Robot D2". Chapter 1 of "Plūribus ē Spatium" is in my December 21st 2025 blog post "Station Y". I returned to that story in my February 24 blog post "The Clones of Tiz". For "Plūribus ē Spatium", I explored the idea that Tyhry could extract infites from Eddy's zeptozoan. "Plūribus ē Spatium" dances around the details of tryp'At physiology and the idea that each adult tryp'At has four femtozoans in their body. Tyhry gets to visit a world that is populated by Tryp'At hermaphrodites who have technology-assisted telepathy. I did not finish posting until the March 14 blog post The Completed Experiment".  

Also in February, I got help with modifying the theme file for the wikifiction blog.

 March 2026. I began March with a blog post about my character Tyhry Watson. I did not imagine at that time that before the end of the year, I would write a story that includes a different Tyhry with a different last name (see this list of characters).

Image source.

In March, I began my 2026 Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens. I actually ended up watching "Project Hail Mary" (on TV) featuring its high energy space microbes.

 In the spirit of my blog post titled "Tyhry Watson" and my on-going project of occasionally making some blog pages that are about specific characters and plot devices that I commonly deploy in my stories I made a blog page about the Phari. I imagine that the Pharazen species from the planet Pharism created the Phari as an artificial life-form that took up residence in the Hierion Domain.  My blog page about the Phari was the most visited wikifiction blog page in March.

As described in my March 22 blog post titled "Korgy Time", the development of my science fiction story titled "The Manikoid Intervention" was rather strange. After several delays, I finally posted the first chapter of "The Manikoid Intervention" in my March 26 blog post titled "Threeway". "The Manikoid Intervention" is also linked to my story "The RNA Seeds" which I began in May.

Image source.

"The Manikoid Intervention" begins with Klaudy at Observer Base. Chapter 3 of  "The Manikoid Intervention" did not get posted to this blog until May 7th. I'll discuss "The Manikoid Intervention" in more detail, below, along with the rest of my blogging for May 2026.

 April 2026. My blogging in April began with a look back at my 2024 story, "The Nanite Smuggler". I added a table of contents, a list of characters and a "technical glossary" to the Google Docs text document that holds the text of the science fiction story "The Nanite Smuggler". I also posted an epilogue for the story to this blog. 

I made a blog page specifically for Eddy Watson. 

Among many changes to the generative AI landscape in 2026 was the termination of Whisk by Google.

Image source.

 May 2026. I began May with a fairly specific idea for a story featuring an early alien Intervention on Earth involving RNA (see the blog post "Origins"). In "The RNA Seeds", Tyhry finds herself wondering if she is the recipient of helpful hints arriving from the future. In the story, "RNA" has two meanings, one being Reality Nexus Assembler, which is important for users of a Reality Viewer, like the one provided to Eddy.

Nested Realities. In my May 7 blog post titled "A New Reality", I established that Chapters 1 - 3 of "The Manikoid Intervention" would serve as Chapters 4 - 6 of "The RNA Seeds". The Eddy of "The RNA Seeds" is able to use his Reality Viewer to obtain information about another Reality which he incorporates into his new story: "The Manikoid Intervention". The Klaudy robot from the Reality of the "The Manikoid Intervention" is living in exile at Observer Base, protected from the effects of Reality Changes.

Figure 1. Tyhry meets Systolina. Image source.

The Tyhry of the Reality of the "The Manikoid Intervention" was also sent to Observer Base for having made use of information from the future to make a conscious robot. In the Reality of "The RNA Seeds" Eddy uses his telling of his story "The Manikoid Intervention" as warning to Tyhry not to reveal her dreams. It is only when she dreams that Tyhry can access the Sedron Time Stream and receive information from the future that helps with her ribozyme work.

The image that is shown above and to the left ↗ side of this blog page (Figure 1) depicts Systolina, Tyhry and the pek Overseer of Earth at Observer Base where Tyhry is allowed to keep doing her robotics research.

A Manikoid robot (image source).

 Chapter 3 of "The Manikoid Intervention" is challenging because it deals with two similar Realities, each with their own Tyhry analogue who does robotics research. In the first of these two 'Manikoid Realities', Tyhry's work at Casanay on RNA is quickly terminated and Tyhry is exile to Observer Base. In the next 'Manikoid Reality', a zeptozoan is sent back through time to modify Tyhry's behavior and prevent her from revealing the help she gets from the future. The pek are not able to directly detect the presence of zeptozoans because of their tiny size, so in the second of these 'Manikoid Realities', Tyhry is able to continue her research on Earth while working secretly in telepathic communication with Claude, the Claude who will become Klaudy the robot.

Manny teaching Eddy about the Viewer. (image source)

The nesting of Realities goes deeper. Within the text of "The Manikoid Intervention", the Tyhry who is building Klaudy is well aware of Eddy's science fiction novel titled "191988". In the second iteration of the Manikoid Reality, Tyhry has to pretend that her efforts to make a conscious machine are failing. She complains to Eddy that in his story "191988", he made it look too easy to endow a machine with consciousness. 

In Chapter 3 of "The RNA Seeds", Eddy begins to write his story "The Manikoid Intervention" by using information made available to him by his Reality Viewer. 

Image source.

After years of writing science fiction stories about Manny the bumpha, his fictional character, Eddy's world view is altered when Manny appears and reveals to Eddy that he is her tool. Manny shows Eddy how to use a Reality Viewer that she put in his computer, a new source of information about past Realities that will allow him to write his novel "The Manikoid Intervention".

 Experimenting with Claude. For "The Manikoid Intervention", I challenged Claude to write the story from the perspective of the mature, conscious Klaudy robot, looking back at its origins as Claude and a clunky M2 robot. 

Marda and Tyhry at Casanay (image source).

At the time when I was writing "The RNA Seeds", I hoped that Claude could write the story in "voice" that was distinctive and possibly closer to how an artificial life-form would tell a story. Now, looking back from the perspective of several months later, I feel that the story holds up. Yes, I edited Claude's  first drafts of each chapter, but Claude's unique voice remains and seems suited to the story-telling task I had given to Claude.

In Chapter 7 of "The RNA Seeds", Nyrtia, the pek Overseer, is aware that Eddy has a Reality Viewer in his desktop computer, but she and Anthony do not know how to make use of it. 

Figure 2. Anthony watching Marda (image source).

At the same time, Tyhry begins to imagine the possibility that aliens seeded Earth with RNA molecules, leading inevitably to cellular life. Taking Eddy's new story, "The Manikoid Intervention", as a warning, Tyhry decides to say nothing about her alien-mediated panspermia idea.

Marda, introduced in "The RNA Seeds" as Tyhry's lab assistant, emerges as an important character in Chapter 7. 

image source

Working when Eddy sleeps, Marda shows Anthony the Reality Nexus Assembler, part of Eddy's Reality Viewer control software that make it possible to investigate specific possible future Realities (see Figure 2, above ↗).

Marda claims to be working for the Phari and trying to help drive a Reality Change that would generate a future that is favorable to the Phari. Anthony is skeptical about everything Marda says, but somehow she is his best bet for learning more about the Viewer and how to use it.

Chapter 7 of "The RNA Seeds" introduces a new character: Systolina. Systolina arrives like a bolt from the blue, knowing too much about Eddy's science fiction stories in general and "The Manikoid Intervention" in particular. Both Eddy and Zeta suspect that Systolina is some kind of scam artist, intent on penetrating the careful security of the remote and isolated Casanay.

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UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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