Rebottling

The murder victim: Sessily. Cover art by Boris Vallejo.

In his novel Araminta Station, Jack Vance provided readers with a murder mystery. Published in 1987, Araminta Station was the first novel in a trilogy, The Cadwal Chronicles. The planet Cadwal almost has a modern feel to its fictional human society. While the residents of Araminta Station have access to the local spaceport, owning a personal spaceship is expensive, about like owning a private jet aircraft in our world. When most residents of Araminta Station travel to distant planets, they buy tickets for passage on-board regularly scheduled commercial flights. Sadly, Vance did not include anything like cell phone technology in his imagined future society, but Araminta Station does have a fairly extensive system of cameras for recording events in the community's public spaces.

cover art by Tim White

Vance did not tell us the exact number of residents living in Araminta Station. The small community was originally intended to hold about one hundred staff members who would manage the logistics of keeping the planet Cadwal free of looters and rescuing nerdy members of the Naturalist Society who came from Earth to study the unique and often dangerous life forms of the planet. For example, shown above is a tangle-top, one of the indigenous lifeforms. Cadwal is a nature preserve, and the chief administrator is the Conservator, whose house is located at Araminta Station. That cover art by Boris Vallejo (above) also depicts the young nubile, Sessily Veder, who is the murder victim. Using video evidence recorded by the array of cameras at Araminta Station, the police soon have a suspect in the case of Sessily's mysterious disappearance.

Araminta Station. Cover art
by Luc Desmarchelier.

As is typical for conventional murder mysteries, the first suspect in the case of Sessily's death is not the actual murderer. However, the investigators of the crime, who include Glawen Clattuc, Sessily's boyfriend and the main protagonist of Araminta Station, end their investigation of the case in frustration. They feel that they know the identity of the murderer, but they have insufficient evidence to convict. A major roadblock for the investigation is that Sessily's body is not recovered by the Araminta Station police force.

At the start of the story, Glawen's father is a long-standing member of the Araminta Station police and Glawen becomes a young police cadet in training. Eventually, after Sessily's murderer tries to eliminate Glawen (for the second time), Glawen realizes who actually killed Sessily. You need to read the novel to learn Vance's solution to the murder mystery.

Part 9 of Yōd on Earth (Part 1)(Part 2)(Part 3)(Part 4)(Part 5)(Part 6)(Part 7)(Part 8)

Yōd

Yōd
Yōd is bored. She can't understand why I continue to fret over the proper way to tell the Exode Saga. I've had several conversations arguments with Yōd about the idea of trying to interpret science fiction stories such as Araminta Station as garbled accounts of future events in other Realities of Deep Time. We had another of these little arguments today. I had convinced Yōd to read the entire Cadwal trilogy.

Yōd: I still don't agree that Sessily had telepathic abilities. Or Glawen, for that matter.

Me: Well, that's just an interpretation of clues provided by Vance. Remember, my assumption is that Vance's replicoid knew more about telepathy than Vance did.

source

Yōd: And you think Vance was just a puppet, writing anything that his replicoid wanted to be written?

Me: No matter.

Yōd: Oh, ya, that's your favorite example of science fiction code. You believe that Vance was made to repeatedly put the phrase "no matter" into his stories.

Yōd giggled and shook her head, mocking me.

sedrons

Me: Well, eventually I realized that another way of interpreting that phrase was as a hidden message meaning "know matter". That led to the discovery of hierions and sedrons, new forms of matter.

Yōd groaned and rolled her eyes.

Yōd: Maybe you should rephrase that as "fictional discovery of hierions".

Me: Yes, of course. Anyhow, I've been forced to start examining my own habits, searching for similar examples from my own fiction writing... looking for clues to how my behavior has been guided and shaped. It occurred to me that maybe Gohrlay's replicoid system was being used to help me in this task.

Image source

Yōd: Wait now. Which is it? Do replicoids obscure the truth with codes or help you break the codes?

Me: Yōd, don't you see that it must be both? For decades I was being prepared for the task of writing the Exode Saga. Then, when the time came, after the Huaoshy had put an end to time travel, new rules were in effect. We were then under the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact and I could finally write the Exode Saga. At that point, the de-coding process had to be facilitated, but for earlier decades it was all coding, all the time.

Yōd thought about it and took a few minutes to skim through her ebook copy of Araminta Station. When she gave up searching that book, she looked at me again.

Yōd: I don't have your imagination. What coded information do you imagine is present in Vance's novel Araminta Station?

I laughed and tried to decide where to begin.

Me: Lately, I've been thinking about misdirection. Specifically, warning to me about how my attention has been guided and misdirected towards dead ends. A good example is provided by Vance in Araminta Station. For years everyone suspects that Glawen's cousin Arles is the person who murdered Sessily. Only much later is the truth revealed.

Yōd: I see. Glawen only figured out the identity of the murderer after miraculously surviving an attempt to eliminate Glawen at Pogan's Point.

source

Me: While imprisoned in the cave at Pogan's Point, Glawen had time to think. That's one of the big lessons that I've learned from both Vance and Asimov.

Yōd: You've learned to take your time?

Me: Well, I'd prefer to say that I've learned to think things through, but, ya, that does take time.

Yōd: And have you thought of something or are you just waiting for inspiration to strike? What you've been doing looks an awful lot like procrastination and writers block.

Me: Well, I can tell you where my thoughts have led, so far. I still don't feel like I've reached an endpoint for my cogitations.

The Final Reality

Yōd: Tell me where you are, currently.

Me. Actually, Araminta Station was the starting point, but now I'm back to Asimov. He was a master of misdirection, creating alternative hypotheses, if you will.

Yōd: He was a scientist.

Me: Exactly! And that's why a scientist had to be the Editor. But misdirection was even applied there.

Yōd: What do you mean?

image source

Me: Originally, just before the Final Reality, there was a different Editor. A decoy.

Yōd: What are you talking about?

Me: I'm not sure I should discuss the matter. Actually, it is a side issue for our current discussion.

Yōd: I want to understand your thinking. Tell me about this decoy.

Me: Well, I'm not sure where to begin. Have you ever heard of Philip Kindred Dick?

Yōd: Isn't he a science fiction writer?

I nodded and in a moment Yōd had a Blade Runner 2049 trailer running on her tablet. She waved her device at me.

Yōd: This was written by Dick?

Me. Well, Dick wrote a story back in the 1960s that inspired the Blade Runner movies.

Yōd: And you think that Dick was the original Editor?

Daneel

Me: It would be interesting to visit the Buld Reality and see just how far Dick's analogue got in describing the aliens who have long been visitors to Earth. Through temporal momentum, here in the Final Reality, he tried to warn humans about aliens watching over Earth, but he ended up being recorded in history as a psychologically unstable drug user who died at age 53.

Yōd: Replicants and robots. Is that the link to Asimov?

Me: What? Oh, I see. No, that was not my line of thought. I've never read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I've never watched the Blade Runner films, so I have no idea how replicants compare to Asimov's robots like Daneel. Anyhow, the use of Dick as a decoy Editor is not the important idea, although it does make me wonder what could happen to me if I made an error in the telling of the Exode Saga. What happened to Dick, how his life ended at such a young age, serves as a warning. As does the removal of Ivory from this world.

Yōd: So, you heed these warnings and stop writing? Stasis?

Second Foundation

Me: There is no use in writing my way down a blind alley. I need to be sure I'm going down an alleyway that leads towards my goal. Not someone else's goal.

Yōd: What alternative hypotheses did Asimov suggest?

Me: I'm sure that in the Final Reality he was not allowed to publish anything that would be a clear and direct message for the Editor. However, his fictional examples of misdirection make the point. For example, look at how he ended the story of Second Foundation.

Yōd. Ah, I think I know what you are driving at. Everyone in the First Foundation was allowed to believe that they had defeated the Second Foundation.

The End of Eternity

Me. Right. And another good example is found in Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity.

Yōd opened her copy of The End of Eternity on her tablet. She read through the table of contents in order to refresh her memory of the story.

Yōd: Do you mean Asimov's depiction of Harlan taking until the very end of the novel to figure out why he should help put an end to the Eternity time travel device?

Noÿs and Harlan

Me: Sorta. But it is deeper than that. Yes, is some sense, every member of Eternity, including Harlan, was indoctrinated with the belief that Eternity was a necessary part of Earth's history. Then the people of Earth's far future realized that the technology of time travel and the mere existence of Eternity was incompatible with human survival and would prevent any long-term future for human civilization. In the end, Harlan's entire world view was altered and he became a willing accomplice in the act of destroying Eternity... and giving Humanity a chance to have an infinite existence spreading among the stars.

Yōd: And you think you are facing the same kind of choice, that type of dead end vs. infinite future decision point?

Me: No. I don't believe that I've ever been given that kind of freedom. It is not a matter of me making the right choice. It is more about fuzziness, I guess.

Yōd: Fuzziness?

Me: Asimov explained it in his book. No matter how carefully you try to examine Reality, there is always some chance variation, some fuzziness. This is fundamentally an issue of quantum uncertainty. In my case, I've been forced into a particular alleyway of Time, but I still have choices I can make. I have to believe that I can still make some choices. It is that micro-domain of my options that I'm concerned with. And I suspect that I long ago made a poor choice that was just as misguided as Glawen suspecting that Arles had killed Sessily.

Yōd: What is the poor choice that you made?

Changing the dimensional structure of the universe (source).

Me: I accepted the idea that over the course of many many years, the Huaoshy made multiple alterations to the dimensional structure of the universe. Then, they had to undo some of their work after they discovered that they had made time travel possible. I assumed that the Huaoshy could selectively eliminate time travel from the Final Reality while still allowing for the possibility of faster than light space travel.

Yōd: I saw the consequences of that most recent change in the dimensional structure of the universe when I was on Tar'tron. Not only was time travel terminated, but also telastid-mediated telepathy.

Me: And just like Glawen, I have assumed that I could go no further than that in my attempts to understand the physics of the Final Reality. In fact, you played a major role in making me stop thinking about the consequences of dimensional engineering.

Yōd: Me? What did I do?

Me: When you arrived on Earth, I was carefully led to believe that you and Asimov's replicoid were arriving here after a visit to the Andromeda galaxy.

Yōd: We were.

Me: And based on that evidence, I assumed that all was going well with the Trysta-Grean Pact. I assumed that time travel is no longer possible, but within this Final Reality, humans will eventually obtain technology for travel between the stars. I wanted to believe that Humanity has a great future awaiting us, a future in which people will spread to millions of planets in our galaxy.

Yōd: What is the problem? You don't believe that anymore?

Me: One of the lines from Araminta Station is Glawen saying that he had learned never to jump to conclusions and take things for granted. Well, I assumed that humans would be able to spread through space from Earth to the stars, but where is the evidence? Yes, there was the well-timed arrival of you and the Asimov replicoid, but that does not settle the question.

Yōd: Why not?

Me: I still need evidence that a human can travel to the stars.

Yōd: I'm not human enough for you?

Me: No, that's not the correct way to put it. I almost got tricked by you. It was far to easy for me to forget that Yōd's mind was swapped into your body. You are some kind of hybrid creature: part human and partially the mind of some artificial lifeform that was able to travel between galaxies.

Yōd: What do you mean by that: "the mind of some artificial lifeform"?

Me: It all started with Asimov. An Asimov replicoid was sent to the Galactic Core. That's where you met him, on Tar'tron. However, that replicoid was not a human.

Yōd: Right. As a replicoid, that "copy" of Asimov is an artificial lifeform.

Me: Right. And combine that with Vance's oft' repeated warning: know matter. I only met the Asimov replicoid briefly, so I was fooled. In fact, he and you put on a show, going into the back bedroom for a little romp.

Yōd: Don't remind me. It is frustrating: waiting here and hoping he will return to Earth so we can renew our romping.

Me: Yes, it was easy for me to imagine that you were two star-crossed lovers. For a time, that even made me forget that a replicoid isn't a man. So the fact that he traveled to the Andromeda galaxy and back meant nothing. I still don't know if a human can travel at faster-than-light speeds the way that they did in past Realities such as the Asimov Reality.

Yōd: What about me?

On-board Many Sails

Me: I finally asked myself: if Asimov's example proves nothing, then maybe I was tricked into misinterpreting the significance of his intergalactic travel on-board Many Sails.

Yōd: Who would try to trick you? Why trick you?

The Exode Saga (image credits)

Me: Yes, that is the key question that I had to be led to. You did not want me to ask the correct question. You just keep pushing me to finish up the Exode Saga, including the bogus idea that the Trysta-Grean Pact is being implemented.

Yōd: I truly believe that to be the case.

Me: Yes, I suppose you would never have been allowed to get close to me had you not believed in the truth of the Pact. But I wonder... for some reason, even now you won't admit that I'm right.

Yōd: I understand your hypothesis, but I don't agree that you have proved it. I grew up as a human. And don't forget about your wife; just one of a large number of clones, but also a human.

Me: Yes, and someone went to the trouble of making sure that I married one of Gohrlay's cloned "sisters" and she gave birth to our children. What more evidence could I need to believe that a Gohrlay clone is human. And, in your case, I can't deny that you are now in a human body, one that was born on Earth.

Yōd: So what's the problem? I'm a human who has traveled between the stars. In future times, more humans will do so, once the people of Earth develop the needed technology.

Me: I was ready to believe that. For a time I did believe that. I don't know, maybe you do still believe it.

Yōd: I do.

Me: But can't you understand that I can't accept it. Oh, sure, I want to believe it. However, this is too important to take on faith. I need evidence that humans can still travel to the stars at speeds faster than light. You see, I have no evidence to support the claim that you originated as a biological entity, as a human being.

Yōd: I know I did.

Me: Do you? Do you really? What if you were just a simulated human being? What if you were something else, like a femtobot? Designed to look human, but not composed of hadronic matter.

Yōd laughed.

Yōd: Okay, let's look at your hypothesis. Who would design such a deception? Why bother?

Me: The pek have always wanted to replace humans with the Prelands and eventually convert humans into a type of artificial lifeform, something that can exist within the sedronic domain.

Yōd: But Trysta viewed the future, the Final Reality, a future in which humans will travel to the stars.

Me: Yes, that is the story that I started to tell in the Exode Saga. It is a very feel-good story. But I can't just take it on faith.

Yōd: Okay, let me see if I understand your problem. You suggest that the Huaoshy, in their final act of dimensional engineering, did not only end time travel and telastid-mediated telepathy, but also faster-than-light travel for beings like humans that are composed of hadronic matter.

Me: Yes.

Yōd: Well, if you really believe this nightmare, what are you going to do about it? Is there anything that could be done?

Me: Well, at the very least I don't have to do what I was starting to do: write the Exode Saga as a story about the happy success of the Trysta-Grean Pact.

Yōd: Fine. Tell the story any way you want. I think the important thing is just the basic idea that aliens have long been visiting Earth. It was intrinsically a part of the Pact that Earthlings would not know their future.

Me: That was how Glawen spent a couple of years, telling himself that he could never know who had killed Sessily. But he did not forget about Sessily. Eventually he solved the case.

Yōd: And now you want to resolve this question? Tell me, what if humans could only travel to the stars at the speed of light? Would that be so bad?

Me: I don't know.

Yōd: Okay. So what are you going to do?

Me: What you really are trying to ask is: "will I now get back to writing the Exode Saga and get it done already?", aren't you?

Yōd: I am.

source

Me: Why is it so important to you that I finish writing the Exode Saga?

Yōd: Many Sails told me that she was sending me to Earth to help you finish your work.

Me: And what if my work... what if our work is finding out the truth about Humanity's future among the stars?
 ________________

I called this blog post "rebottling" because of the idea that once a technology is deployed, it is very hard to "force it back into the bottle". The Huaoshy first made time travel possible, then they had to put that evil genie back into its bottle. The question is, what other changes were made when the Huaoshy recently altered the dimensional structure of the universe? Can we humans still spread to the stars?

Continue to Part 10 of Yōd on Earth.

Next: investigating the origin of science fiction

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Story Time

original cover art by Alejandro de Cañedo

I'm fascinated by the process of story telling. Sharing stories is a core element of the human condition and I like to imagine that the earliest humans made use of stories as a fundamental tool for exploring the strange and mysterious world they found themselves in.

On the time scale of human evolution, written stories are a relatively recent invention. I'm not at all convinced that books (novels) are the best medium for telling stories, so I like to experiment with online software tools such as blogs that provide new ways of sharing stories.

Hyperstories

split brain

The human brain is a connection machine. In some sense, the human brain is a network of connected modules. Experiments with "split brain patients" suggest that it is normal for humans to "be of two minds". If we have multiple consciousnesses, only one of which dominates the flow of our autobiographical memory system, then we must ask: should a good story appeal to our entire mind? If so, then maybe a good story must simultaneously function on multiple levels.

Linearity

cover art by Michael Whelan

A danger in story telling arises from letting your linear left brain take control of the story telling process. We have the ability to reduce any phenomenon to a linear story, but in so doing, we may destroy the higher dimensional structure of what we are trying to describe. But what if our human brains are not suited for dealing which higher dimensional problems and stories? M. A. Foster explored the idea that genetic engineering could be used to create "the next humanoid", a human variant that could more efficiently deal with complex multidimensional problems.

Exode
I've been exploring the idea that "the Editor" could act as an organizing focus for a collection of story tellers who would, as a group effort, tell the story of the Exode Saga. However, I have begun to doubt the wisdom of using a narrative structure that is built mostly upon the limited perspective of the Editor.

See the original (1962) cover
art by Johannes Bruck

I can't stop myself from wondering: why not have multiple narrative threads, with a story that can "simultaneously" be told from several perspectives that are distinct from my own?

Overseers vs Interventionists
In the Exodemic Fictional Universe there is a billion-year-old struggle between Interventionists (bumpha) and Overseers (pek). The Editor must struggle with doubts about the wisdom of allowing Interventionists to alter the historical timeline of Earth. The Editor knows that some sympathizers of the Interventionist cause (such as Ivory Fersoni) have been forcibly removed from Earth so as to prevent them from revealing forbidden secrets to Earthlings. On the other hand, the Editor cannot abide the idea that self-appointed tryp'At Overseers have taken it upon themselves to decide what we humans can learn about alien visitors to Earth.

original cover art by Dirk Schulz

Golden Braid
Would it be possible to create an introductory description of the Overseer-Interventionist dynamic and then allow readers to explore along three different narrative paths:
1) that of the "neural observers" such as Parthney and the Editor
2) that of Interventionists such as Ivory who are certain that Earthlings should be better informed
3) that of Overseers such as the tryp'At Overseers who have no intention of letting folks like Ivory run wild.

Image source
prepared for publication by the Dead Widowers

My natural instinct has been to paint the Overseers as incompetents who must allow the Interventionists just enough "wiggle room" to make changes to the timeline of Earth.

Laziness
My avoidance of taking the tryp'At Overseers seriously is a form of laziness. There must be an interesting story behind the origin of the tryp'At and how a small cadre of try'At took control of Observer Base. Originally, the tryp'At were crafted in order to make it possible to station agents on Earth: agents controlled by the pek, but biologically indistinguishable from ordinary Earthlings.

What if a group of tryp'At agents became "renegades" and began playing the role of Earth Overseers, even though the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact had originally specified that Observer Base would be decommissioned in the Final Reality?

The Making of a Replicoid
The original replicoids were tools of R. Gohrlay and her cadre of positronic robots. After Grean and the Kac'hin took control of Eternity, they adapted replicoids for their own needs. The Asimov replicoid who travels to Tar'tron was "manufactured" as a replicoid in Eternity.

spy

I've toyed with the idea of an introductory scene during which Asimov's replicoid is on board Many Sails before reaching Tar'tron. However, it might be better to have a tryp'At spy inside Eternity notice the creation of Asimov's replicoid and bring that event to the attention of the tryp'At Council. After Asimov's replicoid has had a chance to interact with the Council and learn their "side of the story", Many Sails could arrive and take Asimov's replicoid off to Tar'tron.

Next: The X-Files: Season 11.

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Ideal Vision

I own this other edition

I've been forced to take a reflective turn ever since I decided to use my favorite science fiction authors as templates for fictional characters in the Exode Saga. Back in the 1970s, when I became a fan of stories written by Isaac Asimov and Jack Vance I had very little interest in them as writers or as individual human beings: all I wanted was their mind-stretching fiction. I'm still not particularly interested in them as people, so I've never bought their auto-biographical books. Frankly, I prefer to think of them as magical beings who crafted magical stories... I don't want to know them as mundane humans with warts and petty foibles.

Forced to Learn
However, even while trying to avoid learning about Asimov and Vance as fallible human beings, I have not been able to prevent myself from discovering a thing or 2 about their lives as writers. First of all, here in the age of the interwebs, vast amounts of information about these two authors is right at my finger tips and impossible to completely ignore. However, my greatest downfall is that I bought a copy of Gold, the cover of which teases, "The last words from SF's grand master."

Newly released by the Dead Widowers.
Original cover art by Robert Maguire.

Gold begins with a fun science fiction short story about a robot named Cal who writes fiction. The book is divided into three parts. The first part is called "The final Stories". After 'Cal', there is nothing particularly memorable until the last story which is called 'Gold'. I blame Gold the book, 'Cal' and the story 'Gold' for pushing me towards turning Asimov into a character in the Exode Saga. It is good to have excuses for one's bad behavior.

Asimov wrote himself into 'Gold'. Actually, the analogue of Asimov in 'Gold' is named Gregory Laborian. Similarly, although less obviously, Asimov is a character in 'Cal': the mystery writer (Mr. Northrop) who owns the robot named Cal. Northrop and Laborian are both alternate versions of Asimov that might have existed in another Reality. If Asimov could have the fun of writing himself into stories, then surely his fans should be able to do the same.

Ideal Vision

Two copies of Asimov!

Currently, for A Search Beyond, I'm busily putting words into the mouth of Asimov's replicoid. As a fan of Asimov, I don't want to make Asimov's replicoid say anything that I can't imagine the real Asimov would have said.

However, in some sense the Asimov's replicoid is his own "man". As an artificial life form, he began with all of the memories from the original biological Asimov, but some things were changed. For example, I imagine that Asimov's obsession with writing was toned down. The Asimov replicoid was created for a purpose, and that purpose could not have been fulfilled were the replicoid constantly writing. In the Exode Saga, the Asimov replicoid is an idealized version of Asimov, created to play a role in a story.

source

As an example of the danger I face of putting improper words into Asimov's mouth, I point to a review of The End of Eternity by Rich Horton. In that book review, Horton suggested: "Asimov's ideal vision, as presented in this book and elaborated in his Foundation/Empire books, is of a human-dominated galaxy." This claim is an example of conflating
1) a reader's opinion, arising from reading fiction written by Asimov, with
2) Asimov's personal beliefs.

In Gold, part two is called "On Science Fiction" and part 3 is "On Writing Science Fiction". In part two there is an essay called "The All-Human Galaxy". In that essay, Asimov described the struggle that he had with John Campbell over the "proper" way to depict human-alien interactions and relationships in science fiction stories. When he started writing stories set in an "all-human galaxy", Asimov did not believe that humans "need to get to the stars before" aliens. Asimov had simply discovered that by setting his stories in an all-human galaxy he did not have to keep dealing with Campbell's inconvenient beliefs and editorial judgements about aliens.

Isaac's Universe

I suspect that Asimov believed that artificial life forms are much more likely to spread through the galaxy than is any flimsy type of biological organism such as we humans. I think Asimov liked the idea of humans constantly exploring new domains of knowledge, but the idea that humans should dominate a galaxy that is filled with many forms of life was Campbell's idea, not Asimov's. In fact, in part 2 of Gold is another essay called "Inventing a Universe". In that essay, Asimov describes a fictional universe ("Isaac's Universe") that he devised which features humans and five other intelligent species co-existing in the galaxy.

Future Mystery

For the Exode Saga, the Asimov Replicoid is made use of for his ability to explore the AR Simulation. In the end, he may very well decide to remain inside that simulation, preferring that lost universe to our own. I'm already getting hints from Yōd that the Asimov replicoid might have already made that choice.

Related reading: more Amizovs

Also: more fiction with Asimov as a character

Next: a look back at The Palace of Love

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Genes of Dar Sai

image credits

Zeta reports that the Asimov Replicoid has completed another session inside the AR Simulation of Eternity. Asimov discovered that after the death of Demon Prince Howard Treesong, Alice Wroke, Kirth Gersen and Karalin Umdys visited the Cora System. They had originally suspected that they might find evidence of human genetics experiments on the planet Methel, but their investigation soon led them to Dar Sai where they discovered a secret human genetics laboratory.

1971

Mind Transfer
Back when I was in my personal golden age of discovering printed science fiction, I read the story "Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Poul Anderson earned a degree in physics, but his fictional biology was quite disappointing for me to wade through even as a teenager.

Jack Vance (left) and Poul Anderson (under the dart board) [image source]

Trilateroids

In "Call Me Joe", Anderson not only imagines complex life on Jupiter but some sort of hyper-accelerated evolution of an advanced human-like pseudojovian by Earthly scientists (starting from atmospheric spores scooped up from the high clouds of Jupiter). With a few decades of artificial evolution, a replica of the human brain is crafted inside a beast with Jovian biochemistry.

In the Ekcolir Reality
Original cover art by Ken Distler
Special thanks to Miranda Hedman
for "Black Cat 9 - stock" that I used
to create the blue sedronite.

The pseudojovian must have a human brain in order for it to be psionically linked with the brain of a human. In "Call Me Joe", Anderson tells us little about the future science "psibeam" that is used to link a human in orbit to the pseudojovian on Jupiter. For the Exode Saga, I imagine that the basis for telepathy was a strange type of physics involving imaginary particles: hierions.

source

According to Zeta, in the Asimov Reality, the bumpha "revealed" the fact that the Trilateroids had been developed as part of an ancient study of telepathy. In that Reality, human telepathy was pushed to its peak through intensive human breeding experiments.

Jerdian

Writing here in the Final Reality, Jack Vance left many hints in his stories that Gersen and Glawen both had a low -but noticeable- level of telepathic ability. Apparently, the bumpha could provide any human with a "telepathy amplifying" nanite prosthetic, and Gersen and Glawen were two of the people in the Asimov Reality who had their innate telepathic abilities boosted by the bumpha.

According to Zeta, Kirth Gersen was able to make use of his amplified telepathic abilities to find the secret laboratory on Dar Sai where the pek were carrying out human breeding experiments. Those experiments culminated in the creation of special combinations of genes derived from both the Methelen and the Darsh.

Next: Isaac Asimov as a character in the Exode Saga

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Lost Pages

In an alternate Reality, this blog post could have been called "censorship". The topic of censorship is never far from my thoughts because my thoughts have been edited and censored. The editing of my memories was the price I paid for being allowed to remain here on Earth.

Lost Pages
Knowledge of the lost pages of my mind, limited as it is, makes me fear that I have lost something precious and that fills me with foreboding. What if I now "rediscover" the same forbidden knowledge that previously had to be scrubbed out of my thoughts? Is there a "two strikes and you are out" rule being enforced by the tryp'At Overseers? For all I know, I maybe on my third strike. Or thirteenth.

The image above and to the right is the original "duckrabbit" illustration from 1892 that was made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein. It reminds me that by seeing events in more than one way we have a chance to expand our minds and not get stuck inside false views of Reality.

The human brain can be a trap that locks us into one view of Reality. Currently, my collaborator Zeta and I are struggling mightily to escape from our old restricted and misleading view of what the Asimov replicoid will be able to accomplish during his exploration of the AR Simulation. With exuberant optimism, I had begun to view the AR Simulation as a type of futuristic book that the replicoid of Isaac Asimov could step into and where he could investigate the mysterious origins of the tryp'At.

source

Zeta suggests that there is nothing wrong with this analogy relating the AR Simulation to a book. However, like a book, there might be some "lost pages" that have been cut out of the AR Simulation. Apparently the Asimov replicoid tried to extract some forbidden knowledge from the AR Simulation and he almost didn't make it back out. I fear that Asimov escaped from the AR Simulation only because he made the same choice I did: he allowed his memories of forbidden topics to be erased.

In the Asimov Reality
According to Yōd, the part of Deep Time that I think of as the Asimov Reality is actually a family of Realities. I had been led to believe that time travel was not much used while humans were spreading outward from Earth into the galaxy in "the" Asimov Reality, but there were apparently many Reality Changes and "corrections" made to that timeline. Yōd believes that since all those variations were eventually "erased", it is not worth worrying about them.

In the Ekcolir Reality

However, Zeta suspects that most of the "erasures" were carried out by the pek in situations where humans learned too much about advanced technologies. We humans are a constant danger too ourselves: skilled tool users who can turn the power of technology against ourselves.

Karalin Umdys on Sogdian

Zeta believes that in the Asimov Reality, the Phari were carrying out experiments on humans during the entire space age. One site of human experimentation was the planet Sogdian, where cloning technology and developmental control nanites were used to explore the extent to which human brains could be adapted to serve as hosts for femtobot endosymbionts.

genetics 101

Zeta suggests that Kirth Gersen and Karalin Umdys were used by the bumpha as their agents and tools for revealing to humans the existence of the Phari. However, the pek had to subsequently erase that forbidden knowledge from all human memory. Zeta also claims that Kirth and the "Drusilla clones" were almost genetically identical, differing only in that Kirth had been "manufactured" as a male.

Next: a secret human genetics lab on Dar Sai

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