Replicoids

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This blog page has one of my occasional deep dives into either (2) a character from my science fiction stories (example: Tyhry Watson) or (2) a plot element, in this case what I call "replicoids". As seen in the image to the right, replicoids are one of the commonly used plot device in my stories.

Temporal Momentum. My first mention of replicoids in this blog was back in April of 2014 in "Seamount Bermúdez". At that time, I was thinking of replicoids as "artificial life replicas of humans". I was imagining that replicoid copies of humans were stored in the Hierion Domain and used to provide Earth with temporal momentum, ensuring that successive Realities would contain mostly the same people.

Figure 1.
Zeptites.

I admit that it was never explained how a saved replicoid from one Reality could be used to (1) make sure that a genetically similar individual is also present in the next Reality of the Reality Chain and (2) somehow lock the behavior and personality of that individual into a similar pattern.

Femtobots. The first use of the term "femtobot" in this blog came in September of 2012 in a blog post titled "Adding Rooms to the Bottom". At that time, I imagines that: "The Huaoshy make use of hierion-based artificial lifeforms (femtobots) that are as complex as a human being and which can easily slip right inside a ribosome and take control of which amino acids are built into the growing protein chain. A swarm of Huaoshy femtobots could invade your body and reprogram it to become a completely different organism. The Huaoshy femtobots themselves have true shapeshifting abilities and can form human-sized colonies that take on any convenient physical form."

Figure 2. Image source

And Zeptites, too. With time, my science fiction stories began to settle into a pattern of having aliens with two different levels of technology. The Huaoshy and the bumpha can use zeptites. The pek, Phari, positronic robots and the Quyll only have access to femtobots, which are less sophisticated than zeptites. Zeptites are made of sedrons.

In my imagination there are both femtobot replicoids and zeptite replicoids (see Figure 1) that can perfectly mimic a human body. In 2020, in a story titled "The Synpaz of Seelie", I explored the idea of there being femtobot replicoids that incorporated negative mass hierions in their structures (see Figure 2). In 2022, for my story The Historical Archive, I imagined that the positronic robots of Earth "stole" femtobot replicoid technology from the pek.

Femtobot programming
by Tyhry Watson.

Programming. With the correct nanite programming skills, replicoids can be made to alter their shape (this is hinted at in the bottom of Figure 1). By 2025 (see "Gharks, Grendels, Robots and Femtozoans") I was deploying other intelligent swarms of femtobots as "femtozoans" that could take up residence inside humans. Of course there were also other even smaller artificial life forms called "zeptozoans". Previously I had imagined non-intelligent femtobot endosymbionts and zeptite endosymbionts that resided inside human brains.

I've had fun imagining that Tyhry can learn the basics of femtobot programming. Most recently, in the story "War of Words", a few humans are provided with programmable femtobots by the alien Quyll.

Femtobot Replicoids. Also in "War of Words", a few humans are converted into femtobot replicoids. Rylla discovers that her parents were converted into femtobot replicoids who continued living on Earth. In "War of Words", I described such replicoids as being immortal artificial life forms.

Figure 3. Image source.

For "War of Words", I also imagined that conventional humanoid robots could be given an "upgrade" and be transformed into femtobot robots that are like "honorary replicoids" that perfectly mimic the human body. For some stories, I have imagined that femtobot replicoids and precisely mimic the cellular and molecular constituents of the human body, but for "War of Words" I depicted the alien Quyll as being less technologically advance than the pek, so the Quyll replicoids do not contain DNA that can be sequenced.

In "War of Words", the Fredy character (see Figure 3) is transformed into a replicoid copy only after having produced four children while a biological human. In contrast, her daughter, Ros'quessa, gives up her biological existence and becomes a replicoid so that she can enter into the Hierion Domain where the Quyll reside.

Figure 4. A Quyll on
Earth (image source).

Replicoid Body Exchange. The peak complexity of Quyll replicoid technology is shown right at the end of "War of Words"m in Chapter 7, when two replicoid copies of Ros'quessa are made. One copy retains all of Ros'quessa's memories, but the other copy is used as a physical "appendage" of Cyrano, an artificial life-form that the Quyll crafted from the Claude artificial intelligence.

In "War of Words", the alien Quyll appear on Earth in the form of replicoids that have been given an appearance that is meant to not be threatening to the human allies of the Quyll (see Figure 4). I had fun imagining that the Quyll used negative mass hierions to provide themselves with clothing that floats around their artificial bodies, as a kind of trick that is intended to impress their human allies.

Terminology. In some stories I use the term "probot" to refer to replicoid copies of positronic robots (see Figure 5, below).

Next: femtobots and zeptites.

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