Clones in Exode

I previously described Hemmal as a planet "where knowing your parents can have no possible benefit". I made that statement in the context of receiving help from one's parents to "get ahead" in life. Kach and Parthney, two major characters in Exode were born on Hemmal and they do not know who their parents were. That is normal for Hemmal.

Kach and Parthney were raise by pek, artificial lifeforms that normally do all the parenting of false Buld who are born on Hemmal. I'm forced to say "normally" because Kach provides an exception to this general rule by having a son (Boswei) and raising him herself. Boswei becomes the first person born on Hemmal who knows his parents.

False Buld
Not very many false Buld are born on Hemmal. It is theoretically possible for false Buld to arise spontaneously, but on Hemmal such things are not left to chance. The pek generally monitor (and frequently control) Buld pregnancies. For example, Kach is the first female born on Hemmal. Prior to the need for Kach, all the false Buld ever born on Hemmal were males. Like Parthney, those false Buld were all intended to be trained at places such as Lendhalen for missions on Earth as Interventionist agents.

The pek keep great records. For example, they have "on file" the genomes of everyone who has ever lived on Hemmal. They also have the technological means to produce a cloned individual who is genetically identical to any of the previous residents of Hemmal (or anyone else for whom they have the gene pattern).

I previously mentioned that in Exode, when Parthney finally does arrive on Earth, Janet Jeppson notices the close similarity between Thomas and Parthney. It turns out that Parthney is genetically identical to Thomas. How can that be?

Thomas is born on Earth and Parthney is born on Hemmal about 15 years later. When Noÿs is teleported to Klyz (see the timeline) she provides the pek with the genetic pattern of her son Thomas and shares with them a plan: when the Buld spaceship arrives at Earth, "Thomas", a carrier of the advanced nanites that Noÿs brought from the future, must be there to meet the Buld. The pek interpret this to mean that they must clone Thomas and have the clone on Earth when the Buld arrive. Parthney is a clone of Thomas and the pek make sure that Parthney arrives on Earth in the 20th century.

However, the situation is even more complicated than that, because Noÿs, as a time traveler, reaches Klyz about 10,000 years before Parthney is born. During the subsequent 10,000 years, the pek  produced multiple clones of Thomas and test how they respond to life on Hemmal. The pek discovered that these "copies of Parthney", like Thomas, are creative individuals who tended to have fun on Hemmal participating in artistic/cultural endeavors...and they never really wanted to leave Hemmal, even when told that they can go to Earth. When it was finally time to send Parthney to Earth, Kach was brought into existence as a woman who could efficiently push Parthney off of Hemmal and send him on his way towards Earth.

The Other Clone
One other clone figures in Exode. The pek are not the only source of clones. The Nereids have a fairly advanced level of technology and they can also produce copies of humans. When Kach arrives in the Andromeda galaxy she persistently investigates the Nereids, at first suspecting that the Nereids are the Creators. Parthney is "along for the ride" and he is carrying some of the special nanites that originated from Noÿs. I previously mentioned that some of the Buld develop a "Bimanoid Theory" which, in its form that appeals to Noÿs, says that the Creators are constantly lurking within every human. The Nereids have a similar theory and their history documents times when a few Nereids seem to have "channeled" the Huaoshy.

The nanites inside Parthney simulate such a "channeling" of information from the Huaoshy to the Nereids by way of Parthney. Noÿs, when looking into the future, saw the role that Kach must play in the Solar System. Parthney delivers a message to the Nereids that convinces them that Kach must be sent to Earth. Kach does not believe that she can learn anything useful about the Creators by going to Earth, but she agrees to go as long as she is given the "Parthney Option"...a way to escape from Observer Base. As was the case when Parthney made his escape from the Moon, the Nereids must arrange to "spring" Kach from Observer Base without alerting the Overseers to the fact of her escape. They make a clone of Kach and send the clone to Earth with Izhiun. When Kach completes her mission in the Solar System, Izhiun makes it look like Kach was killed, but it is the clone's body that is recovered while Kach is teleported safely out of the Solar System.

Avi Katz's Vision

What Makes Kach Tick
So, what makes Kach persistently seek contact with the Creators? I assume that unlike Parthney, there is nothing special about her genes. What is it in her environment that makes her special?

As mentioned above, Kach is the first woman born on Hemmal. For the unfolding plot of Exode, her experiences as a woman are important, particularly her desire to be a mother. However, Kach is on a quest to make known the unknowable: what makes her persist in that quest under conditions where nobody else around her can understand what drives her?

Part of "Bimanoid Theory" suggests that if a human does become intrigued by the mystery surrounding the Creators then the Creators can "step in" and suppress or terminate that curiosity. So, the question becomes: is Kach simply not subjected to any efforts to dissuade her from an obsessive desire to meet her makers or do the Huaoshy actively "step in" and encourage her to keep searching? Since Exode is told from the perspective of Parthney and Izhiun, this puzzle is never explicitly answered for readers.

Some Buld know about the evidence for biological evolution on planets like Earth. However, many Buld do adopt the religious beliefs of the Prelands. Even before leaving Hemmal, Parthney is exposed to "free thinkers" like Yandrey who are well aware of the fact that Earth has had an evolving biosphere for billions of years. Parthney is a skeptic: if there are Creators then why don't they show themselves? Parthney dismisses the matter from his thoughts, but Kach is not so easy to satisfy. Kach actively goes in search of the Creators while adopting the assumption that they have a reason for staying out of sight.

Nereid Intervention

When I wrote The Start of Eternity I was using a rather simplified conceptualization of the struggle between Overseers and Interventionists on Earth. A major goal for me in writing Exode has been to create a more detailed understanding of Genesaunt Civilization. In particular, I wanted to answer this question: where do Interventionists come from?

At the most fundamental level, the answer to that question is that interventionism springs from the natural desire of people to help others. From the time long ago when they were still biological organisms, the Huaoshy have always struggled to find just the right balance between 1) letting primitive species like humans solve their own problems and 2) giving a helping hand. Maintaining the continual competition between Overseers and Interventionists is how the Huaoshy allow "wiggle room" for some possible "interventionism" without allowing it to go too far and get out of control.

In Exode, the the story concerns an unusual situation where the balance between Overseers and Interventionists has been disrupted by a freak discovery: the invention of positronic robots by humans. Sorting out the implications of that discovery requires the Huaoshy to pay unusually close attention to events on Earth. Primitive creatures like we humans normally do not come to the attention of the Huaoshy, no more than individual blades of grass in a field are of concern to a horse rancher. However, if a poisonous weed starts growing in a pasture then a concerned rancher is likely to take action before all the horses are killed by the poison. In this analogy, because of the creation of positronic robots, we humans became something like a dangerous weed.

When positronic robots were created on the Moon, the Earth was left without its normal complement of Overseers, but some "backup" help could be brought in from outside the Solar System. However, the dynamic of cultural development on Earth was dramatically changed because there were no more human Overseers available for duty in the Solar System. Under these new conditions on Earth, the Nereid Interventionists were able to assure that the Earthlings began a slow climb towards development of a technological civilization on Earth. Essentially, what changed due to the loss of human Overseers was that important advances like the development of agriculture and use of writing could no longer be prevented from spreading on Earth.

In the Buld Reality, Noÿs negotiates a deal with the Huaoshy. As a consequence of that deal, time travel is used so as to make sure that the development of positronic robots is prevented and the Huaoshy are given back control of Observer Base on the Moon, but the Huaoshy agree to allow the Earthlings to rise from the stone age and establish a technological civilization, as occurred in the Reality when positronic robots existed. The Huaoshy agree to activate a "timer" that establishes a fixed point in time for Earthlings to begin making the transition from their long ignorance of the existence of Genesaunts towards having regular interactions with Genesaunt Civilization. Historically, such transitions only occur on primitive worlds like Earth when the Huaoshy feel that a young sapient species like humans can safely sustain a technological civilization. The Huaoshy do not feel that Earthlings are ready, but they agree to give humans on Earth a chance to prove themselves worthy of greater independence.

In an effort to increase the chances that Earthlings will survive their technological adolescence, the Huaoshy allow the Interventionists to start shifting Preland gene patterns to Earth. This process of genetically modifying the human population of Earth is complicated by the fact that the Huaoshy also obtain the genetic patterns of Noÿs and other humans from the far future. In Exode, the reader is never given a look at the far future of Humanity: the story ends with lingering doubts about our future.

When Noÿs is given the change to look into the future of the Buld Reality it is not yet clear exactly what form the future will take. As discussed previously, the structure of the Buld Reality is dominated by three attractors, three patterns that the future can adopt, but even very small changes in what people like Noÿs do can shift the course of the future between those three patterns. However, even given that uncertainty, the Huaoshy manage to "harvest" human genetic patterns from the far future.

The diversity of types of human genetic patterns available to the Huaoshy is never explained within Exode (however, see Kac'hin), but the presence of these genomes in the hands of the Huaoshy helps explain how the Huaoshy are able to improvise and work to convert Earthlings into a form of humans that has a chance to deal constructively with the powers and risks afforded by advanced technologies. The Nereid Interventionists are able to play an important role in facilitating the movement of useful gene combinations to Earth during the 15,000 year-long trip of the Buld spaceship from the Galactic Core to Earth.

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Note: Ekcolir and Deomede are not clones, they are two versions of the same person in two different Realities.
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Note: A clone of Gohrlay is subjected to destructive brain scan. I've also hinted that Gohrlay is a clone of a previous resident of Observer Base. I later decided to include additional clones of Thomas in Exode. Also, see The Atlantis Clones. Time warp to clones in 2018.

Mission to Andromeda

Alien contact.

I previously revealed some of the secret history of humanity such as the fact that Kach is sent to Earth by the Nereids. Kach and Parthney are the two main characters in Exode. The story Exode takes place in our time, but the story was set in motion long ago. The Nereids are a humanoid species that originated on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy. Closer to home and with a more intimate relationship to humans are the alien Fru'wu. After 10,000 years of helping to develop a technological civilization on Earth, the Fru'wu are nervous that humanity might face the same fate as the Fru'wu: the self-destruction of their home world in a technological disaster.

However, it is not at all clear why the budding civilization if the Fru'wu home world came to an end. The subgroup of Fru'wu who are collaborating with the human Interventionists have received a helping hand from another Fru'wu population that was "cultured" by the Nereids on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy. The surviving Fru'wu have no first hand knowledge about the cause of the destruction of the Fru'wu civilization on their home planet.

Did the Fru'wu home world destroy itself or was it pushed into oblivion by the Nereids? Are the Nereids now pushing human civilization on Earth towards destruction?

Fru'wu

The Buld have had contact with three different groups of Fru'wu:

1) The First Contact with Fru'wu that is recorded in Buld written history occurred about 20,000 years ago, but oral tradition and myths of the human population of the Galactic Core suggests that there were even earlier contacts. Shortly after that first recorded contact, the Pla came into existence as a group of Buld who were free from the influence of pek nanites. Among the Buld, belief developed that these "first Fru'wu" were from the Fru'wu home planet and that they were free of pek influences. That period of First Contact was of short duration.

2) About 15,000 years ago a new group of Fru'wu came into contact with the Buld. These Fru'wu had been "cultured" by the pek on worlds of the Galactic Core, much like the Buld. It is these Fru'wu who were able to share with the Buld the location of Earth. With Fru'wu assistance, the Buld learned how to build a spaceship and send it to Earth, a journey that would take about 15,000 years (traveling at just below the speed of light). Among the Buld, a common belief is that the location of Earth had also been given to the Buld at First Contact with the Fru'wu. According to legend, this sharing of information had angered the pek who then destroyed the budding civilization of the Fru'wu home world. Fearing punishment by the pek, these "second Fru'wu" have secretly maintained a working relationship with the Pla for the past 15,000 years.

Nereid

3) About 10,000 years ago a third group of Fru'wu came into contact with the Buld. Long ago, some Fru'wu had been taken to the Andromeda Galaxy by the Nereids. These Fru'wu in the Andromeda Galaxy developed their own unique culture and eventually arrived in our Galactic Core, traveling in an advanced spaceship that could travel faster than the speed of light. They went to Earth and installed a teleportation terminal that could be used to send humans from the Galactic Core to Earth. This is when a sustained program of human Intervention into the affairs of Earth began. Contact with these Fru'wu from the Andromeda galaxy has only been in the form of intermittent periods of short duration. Occasionally Fru'wu from the Andromeda galaxy arrive in our galaxy. Sometimes they take passengers back to the Andromeda galaxy, passengers who are never heard from again.

Exode is the story of the what happens when the Buld spaceship completes its 15,000 year journey to Earth. The first part of Exode tells the story of how Parthney goes to Earth as an Interventionist agent and is captured by Overseers. When Parthney is rescued and returned to the Galactic Core, he finally has his chance to meet the Fru'wu (Group #2, above) and learn about their concern that the 7,000,000 year old pek program of observing Earth will be terminated when the Buld reach Earth. Both the Observers and the Overseers will be removed from their secret base on the Moon, leaving the Earthlings to fend for themselves.

Oib

Worried that Earthly civilization might self-destruct, the Fru'wu have been trying to re-establish contact with the Nereids. The Fru'wu who have the FTL spaceship that can return to the Andromeda galaxy (group #3 above) report that during the past thousand years, the Fru'wu passengers from Earth's galaxy who have repeatedly tried to make contact with the Nereids were never heard from again. It is hoped that humans might more effectively plead the case for obtaining help from the Nereids. Parthney is invited to go to the Andromeda galaxy in an attempt to get help from the Nereids. Worried that he is not actually an Earthling and therefor not the best person to represent Humanity on this mission to make contact with the Nereids, Parthney suggests that an Earth human go along to the Andromeda galaxy. At this time, Hana is studying the Fru'wu and trying to understand Genesaunt civilization. Parthney and Hana, who met on Earth, are reunited, but Hana does not trust Parthney, believing that Parthney killed her husband.

While Parthney was in training for his mission to Earth, he lived with Gwyned Iwedon, an Earth woman, in the Koly system. He decides to ask Gwyned to go to the Andromeda galaxy. The Fru'wu (group #3, above, with a FTL spaceship) take Parthney back to the Koly star system, but fearing exposure and punishment of their Interventionist cell, the Pla who trained Parthney refuse to renew contact with him. Pla'va leads Parthney to Kach and soon Kach and her son Boswei are aboard the Fru'wu spaceship. Kach is very interested in trying to make contact with the Creators and she agrees to go to the Andromeda galaxy. Kach and Boswei have always been infected by pek nanites and their nanites can spread to other people. Hana's brain becomes infected by the type of pek nanites that are used on Hemmal. Pathney's brain also becomes re-infected.

pek: artificial lifeforms

Parthney re-establishes the type of cognitive resonance that he previously experienced with Kach when they first met on Hemmal. Kach informs Parthney that Boswei is his son.

Due to her genetic makeup, Hana was one of the rare humans on Earth with a brain that was not infected by the type of pek nanites used on Earth. Her freedom from nanites on Earth eventually led to her decision to leave Earth and it was Parthney who teleported her off of Earth. Now, in the Koly star system, Hana for the first time experiences nanite-mediated cognitive resonance with people. Hana and Boswei establish a particularly strong nanite-mediated cognitive connection.

Parthney and Kach go to Andomeda

This is the start of Part 2 of Exode. Parthney, Kach, Boswei, Hana, Steph and Muchlo are taken by the Fru'wu to the Andromeda galaxy where they hope to make contact with the Nereids. Will the Nereids act to help protect the people from Earth or are they perfectly satisfied to make Earthlings responsible for their own fate?

The Fru'wu express doubts about the wisdom of allowing the two pek (Muchlo and Steph) to come along to the Andromeda galaxy. Muchlo denies that the pek would ever try to speed the people of Earth towards destruction and blames the Nereids for interfering in the pace of technological development on Earth. 

by Dony Tamazone

Muchlo says it is up to the Nereids to decide if they will back off: they could still prevent the Buld from making First Contact with Earth.

Related Image.

More story illustrations.

Web Weaving

This is the time of year when houses mysteriously sprout giant spider webs and I can't avoid thoughts of the ghost story Moon Hammer. In Moon Hammer, the normal boundary between life and death receives no respect. Characters from Earth's history who we all know to be dead and buried show up as characters in the story, living out their lives at a secret underground city on the Moon. Moon Hammer was intentionally written as a Halloween story, so it might be possible for readers to relax and have fun with the rather casual way in which some terrorists are at one moment blown up in an explosion on Earth then in the next moment shown to be living on the Moon. As Viole Falushe says in the Jack Vance novel, The Palace of Love, "Life, death; these are imprecise terms."

In other circumstances, I find it a challenge to relax my standards and allow fast-and-loose play with the deaths of fictional characters. I've previously declared it a Dirty Trick when authors first make the reader think that a character died, only to later say, "fooled you, that character did not really die!"

That particular Dirty Trick is part of a larger challenge faced by story tellers. My previous blog post touched on the sometimes irresistible temptation to insert a character into a story who just should not be there. Examples of when I've done this include inserting Isaac Asimov into the story The Start of Eternity and inserting Carl Sagan into a fanfiction Contact television series. It is pure mischief to insert Asimov and Sagan into fanfiction extensions of their works, but as Asimov himself wrote, some authorial pranks are just too much fun to resist.

The Final Problem

I'm currently developing the story Exode and my compulsion to insert a real world figure into the story has been growing. Previously, I agonized over the idea I could advance the story by engineering the death of Hana's husband. With time, I was able to accommodate myself to the introduction of a senseless death into Exode. About a month ago I decided that it would be convenient to construct the story in such a way that Hana would spend considerable time and effort searching for her husband, then finally discover that he had been killed.

I still like the idea of making Parthney agonize over the death of Hana's husband in some way. I also like the idea of there being a period of time during which Hana blames Parthney for the loss of her husband. This is becoming a rather tangled bit of web weaving:
1) On Earth, Hana's husband becomes a security risk for Parthney and so Parthney must send him away. Parthney lies and tells Hana that her husband is dead. Since Parthey won't explain the circumstances of the death, Hana suspects that Parthney is responsible for the death of her husband.
2) Eventually, both Hana and Parthney have left Earth behind. They meet again while Parthney is trying to make contact with the Huaoshy. At this point in Exode, Parthney is desperate for Hana's cooperation with the search for "god" (the creators of the human species). He admits that while on Earth he lied about the death of her husband. As is so often the case, one lie leads to another and so Parthney tells Hana that her husband accompanied some Fru'wu on a trip to the Andromeda galaxy.
3) Hana now wants to find her husband and she works with Parthney in an attempt to find a way to travel to the Andromeda galaxy.

Original artwork by Lee Moyer

4) Eventually, Parthney develops a working relationship the Fru'wu who decide that they must provide a spaceship to Parthney for an all-human mission to the Andromeda galaxy. By this point in the story, a romantic relationship has developed between Hana and Parthney's son, Boswei. Hana's devotion to her husband and her desire to find him has become a distraction by this point in Exode. Parthney, now well practiced in lying to Hana, lies once more, saying that her husband died while on an earlier Fru'wu mission to the Andromeda galaxy, a mission that was destroyed by the Nereids (who have their home world in the Andromeda galaxy).

Of course, once they reach the Andromeda galaxy and make contact with the Nereids, Hana learns that the earlier Fru'wu missions to the Andromeda galaxy were not destroyed. The crews of the ships that previously arrived in the Andromeda galaxy are still alive and living as the guests of the Nereids. The Nereids are able to assure Hana that her husband was not part of one of the Fru'wu missions to the Andromeda galaxy.

By this point in Exode, Hana and Boswei are happy together. Parthney returns to his original lie, telling Hana that her husband died on Earth. Of course, by now Hana cannot believe anything that Parthney says, particularly since he still has never given her a coherent account of her husband's death.

Eventually, Hana's son Izhiun goes to Earth. Hana requests that he try to find out what happened to her husband. While on Earth, Izhiun discovers that Hana's husband is still living on Earth! Long ago he made a deal with Parthney to disappear from Hana's life and Parthney promised to never tell Hana that had been her husband's choice.

Now, here is where my instinctive dislike of the Dirty Trick is aroused. The reader has been told several times that Hana's husband is dead. Suddenly, near the end of Exode Hana's husband finally walks on stage. And, to make things worse, this is where I feel the need to compound my transgressions.

At the end of Exode (which is actually described on the first page), Izhiun decides to provide the people of Earth with a written account of Genesaunt Culture. A Buld spaceship has reached the Solar System from the galactic core, and the Overseer-enforced restrictions on Earthlings having knowledge of Genesaunts have finally been eased. It is a trivial matter for Izhiun to leave behind on Earth a copy of the Exode story when he departs for Mars, but I've been feeling a little strange about the physical form that Exode takes (pages of a blog).

The very first part of Exode that I wrote was an account of a meeting between Parthney and Hana on Earth, just before she decides to leave Earth. In that chapter of Exode, it is revealed that Hana's husband is a writer who she met when they were attending college. I'm tempted to write myself into the story and say that I am Hana's husband...a choice that would explain how the Exode story ended up reaching the internet by way of a blog that I created.

Writing yourself into a story

I've previously mentioned the fact (see the end of this blog post) that Jack Vance found an amusing way to write himself into one of his novels. The Demon Prince novels are full of fictional quotes and blurbs that help sketch for readers some of the cultural background of the fictional universe that Vance created. Vance stuck this in:

"Is it conceivable that he Institute wields more control over the human psyche than we suspect?" - Jan Holberk Vaenz LXII


To me, this looks like a hint from Vance about the dramatic extent to which the mysterious Institute exerts control over the people of the Oikumene. He inserts the hint in such a way that we can imagine it coming, 1,500 years in our future, from a mysterious writer named "Jan Holberk Vaenz".

This kind of trickery reminds me of Isaac Asimov's story Gold. Although the story Gold never mentions either Asimov's name or The Gods Themselves, it is clear that he modeled the "Gregory Laborian" character in Gold after himself.

When I wrote (what was at that time) the first chapter of Exode I originally provided a name for Hana's husband, but it might be possible to simply refer to him as "Hana's husband" through most of the story.

Question for fiction authors: have you ever written yourself into a story?

If so, did you openly use your own name or did you use some trick to disguise the fact that a character in your story was actually you?