Dark Nora

Luri

Several years ago, I received some reports from Anney Fersoni about the Interventionist agents who have recently worked on Earth to prepare humans for First Contact with aliens. And when I say "recently", I mean in the Buld Reality, just before the end of time travel, when Space Energy Missions was preparing Earth for the arrival of the Buld.

Buld spaceship on Earth

Among the "employees" of Space Energy Missions were Luri and Betty. Betty was "abandoned" by Luri when the Buld spaceship arrived and she joined the Dead Widowers.

Dark Nora
Most recently, Yōd has been sharing information with me that comes from her replicoid in the Hierion Domain. According to Yōd, Betty is a tryp'At who thinks of herself as Nora.

Zeta's Twist

Betty

I was previously informed that Betty was an artificial lifeform. At that time, I assumed that Betty was a femtobot. Now I must reconcile the ability of Betty to morph her physical structure with the fact that she was tryp'At. Zeta has been trying to convince me that there is no reason to view a tryp'At composed of hierions as a contradiction. As Zeta put it, "Biological cells composed of atoms or biological cells composed of femtobots... what difference does it make?"

Seeing tryp'At
If the tryp'At are artificial life forms that we Earthlings can never distinguish from true, biological (composed of mainly hadrons; non-hierion structure except for Phari endosymbionts) humans then we must wonder: which residents of Earth have been (or still are) tryp'At?

source

While discussing the issue of "hidden tryp'At" with Zeta and Yōd, the unusual case of Carl Sagan popped into my head. Apparently Sagan was constructed and inserted into the timeline of Earth.

Originally, Gohrlay tried to work within the confines of the temporal inertia system that had been put into place "on" Earth by the positronic robots of Eternity. When the Huaoshy "caught up" with Gohrlay and developed their own time travel technology, the Time Travel War began. Because of their overall superiority in sedron-based technologies and zeptites, the Huaoshy were able to force Gohrlay into a compromise: the Trysta-Grean Pact. I've never seen a written description of the Pact, so there is a large amount of guess work and speculation concerning the terms of the Pact.

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Yōd's Report from the Hierion Domain
Under the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact, the Huaoshy required that human behavior be constrained by a Bimanoid Interface. Gohrlay accepted that, as long as humans were free to spread between the stars and explore the galaxy. This fundamental conflict between the Huaohy demand that humans be under restraint and Gohrlay's wish that humans not be forced into the Sedronic Domain was a major challenge for Grean. According to Yōd, it was Grean who discovered the "tryp'At solution".

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The tryp'At Solution
The tryp'At have a dual nature. The tryp'At cannot be distinguished from normal humans using tools available to we Earthlings. However, the tryp'At have a fully functional Bimanoid Interface. Yōd believes that the behavior of every tryp'At individual can ultimately be controlled by the Huaoshy. A small group of tryp'At have been "installed" as Earth Overseers.

source

Apparently Betty played a key role in establishing tryp'At control over Observer Base. When the Buld spaceship arrived at Earth, Betty was "sacrificed" to the old Overseers and taken to Observer Base. When the old Overseers "stepped down", Betty was there, positioned to take control of Observer Base and install the tryp'At as the new Earth Overseers.

Strangely, it was discovered that a stable Final Reality could only exist if the people of Earth were informed of the fact that the tryp'At Overseers were at work, monitoring the technological development of Earth. Within the confines of the Rules of Intervention, there was only one way to inform the people of Earth about their situation: the story of the Secret History of Humanity would have to be told as a fictional account. Apparently, doing so will allow humans to "function" successfully as space-faring hadronic creatures under the terms of the Pact.

source

Gohrlay's Twist
According to the information that Yōd has received from Eternity, Gohrlay was very concerned that the tryp'At would become "the new Prelands" and eventually replace the humans of Earth. Thus, the tryp'At had to be designed with a special limitation: while they are indistinguishable from normal humans, that are not able to reproduce... they can only be "constructed". Yōd does not seem to know what it would mean to construct a tryp'At, but I suspect that there must be a process that can convert a normal human into a new tryp'At. It would be interesting to know who has the ability to make new tryp'At.

In any case, I cannot escape the suspicion that Sagan may have been tryp'At. Yōd insists that, if true, there would be implications of this that are hard to reconcile with history. I suspect that I previously knew more about how the life of Sagan had been designed and constructed -and for what purpose-. That knowledge may have been taken from me when I made my choice to remain here on Earth.

Georgia Miller

In the Ekcolir Reality. Original cover art by Virgil Finlay.

Yōd claims that research by her replicoid points to a set stories that were published in the Ekcolir Reality and which hint at a woman who might have been used as genetic "stock" for creating Sagan in the Buld Reality.

Miller's stories concerned the Grendels and their ability to alter the chromosomes of humans. Zeta suspects that Miller's analogue here in the Final Reality is Georgia Myrle Miller.

Next: Asimov's impact on the science fiction genre

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125

my Blogger profile

I started using Blogger on October 29th, 2005. For this blog post, I'm going to pause and reflect on my years in the blogosphere.

I actually started blogging 20 years ago, before the term "blog" even existed. Back then, I used my Mac IIcx to put some webpages on the internet using MacHTTP server software. In the old days, blogging was an activity for computer savvy nerds only.

Carl Sagan
In the previous millennium, I first began blogging about science fiction by blogging about Carl Sagan's Contact. Last year I put a copy of that old commentary on the wikifiction blog. And because I love recursive science fiction, I've recently written Carl Sagan into the Exode Trilogy.

The wikifiction blog (this blog) started in 2009. At that time, I was transitioning from using wiki software to collaboratively write fiction and just beginning to use blogging software as a medium for writing and sharing science fiction stories.

125
This blog post is called "125" because this is the 125th blog post for 2015. In 2014 I set a record by writing 125 blog posts for this blog in a single year. This year I'm already at 125 with two more months remaining in the year.

About The Author
I recently did some "house cleaning" for the wikifiction blog. For example, I updated my "About The Author" blurb to reflect my interest in recursive science fiction.

This blog began right when I started using Twitter, so a big part of my "meeting other life forms who enjoy science fiction" involves use of my Twitter account.

wikifiction wordcloud

The name "wikifiction" has slowly come to take on new meaning for me. For 20 years I've been a fan of the hypertext link. You could say I'm addicted to hypertext. Possibly the most distinguishing feature of this blog is my heavy use of hypertext links, but as much as I like text, I also like images. The format of this blog started with a single image in each blog post, but now I tend to have a steady stream of images running the length of my blog posts.

I attribute my increasing pace of writing science fiction and (blogging about it) to my current writing project, what I call the Exode Trilogy. Actually, this is a major effort in what is commonly called "world building", but I think of it as creating a coherent backstory for the Exodemic Fictional Universe.

Asimov
Since the Exode story starts with my fanfiction sequel to Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity, I find myself constantly twisted through time. The Exodemic Fictional Universe not only needs a backstory for the universe as we know it, but also for all of the previous Realities of Earth.

As seen in the wordcloud for this blog, I often blog about Asimov. My special relationship with Asimov began when I first discovered printed science fiction. Asimov's The Gods Themsleves was the first science fiction story I ever read.

Of course, growing up in the 1960s, I was first introduced to science fiction through television (such as Star Trek) . Soon after my discovery that there was an entire science fiction world of published science fiction, I began writing my own science fiction stories.

Blog images and sidebar links.

At the center of my own science fiction story telling is the Fermi Paradox. It seems possible that space aliens with human-like minds and a technologically advanced civilization could have evolved on a distant Earth-like planet many millions of years in our past. I like science fiction stories that include the idea of aliens who visited Earth long ago.

Over the past few years, I've come close to deciding that this blog should really be viewed as one giant science fiction story, or part of one. My science fiction writing has spilled over to several other blogs including one for the Dead Widower Society.

One of my favorite features of the Blogger interface is that it allows a "slide show" of images from this blog to play in the sidebar along the right side of the page. The image shown to the right is from a writing project of the Dead Widowers called Assassination by Subtraction.

more sidebar links

Also in the sidebar of this blog are some links to other websites.

Some of those links are related to Asimov and other writers who have given me inspiration.

For example, my own direction in science fiction writing was heavily influenced by both Clarke and Vance. Fans of Jack Vance will recognize "Bodwyn Wook" as a character from his Cadwal Chronicles.

Neck and neck with Asimov for "most mentions" in this blog is Jack Vance. I often reflect on the fact that given the vast difference between the writing styles of Vance and Asimov it is amazing that they are my two favorite authors. Given my fascination with the science fiction stories of Vance and Asimov, I've been unable resist writing them into my own science fiction stories.

2016 update: death of the sidebar slideshow.

Next: Invasion of the Zeptites.

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Contact 30

Contact 2: the needed sequel.

Carl Sagan's science fiction novel, Contact, was published in 1985. In his story, Sagan depicted a message from aliens that used a series of prime numbers to draw the attention of scientists to a coded set of instructions for how to build a complex piece of alien technology. Also, there was another "message", a message from "God" hidden away inside the transcendental number Pi. We still need another Contact movie to tell the story of the message inside Pi.

I'm currently writing Sagan into the Exode Trilogy and as part of my celebration of the 30th anniversary of Contact, I'm trying to think of a cute trick that would allow me to incorporate prime numbers or transcendental numbers into the story Star Dance.

Primes and Pi on my mind.....

prime spiral
God's fingerprint

The first novel by Arthur Clarke that I read (The City and the Stars) also included prime numbers (see this account).

Gersen and Alusz

Jack Vance included the Greek letter Pi in several of his stories. For example, the star Pi Cassiopeia was described as the location of a planet called Orpo, the world where Demon Prince Kokor Hekkus committed one of his kidnappings while trying to raise 10 Billion SVU as part of his effort to "buy" the inexpressibly beautiful Alusz Iphigenia Eperje Tokay.

A Star King

Beyond mere mention of Pi, in Star King, Vance states that Fourier analysis can be used to break the encryption of the recorded astrogation data for Teehalt's Planet, a world "too beautiful for degradation". However, Gersen is able to negotiate a deal with the owner of the decryption code, allowing him to visit the planet. Of relevance to the Exode Trilogy and the Ekcolir Reality,  Fourier was among the first to recognize the importance of the greenhouse effect for planets like Earth.

The Prime Radiant

Equations "projected" by the Prime Radiant

In Forward the Foundation, Isaac Asimov's character Yugo Amaryl creates the Prime Radiant, a small device that stores all of Seldon's plans for the future of the Galaxy.....or something. We are supposed to think that it is called a "radiant" because it can "project" and display the equations of Psychohistory, although it does not use ordinary projection with light waves. Then exactly what does it "radiate"? I prefer to imagine that the Prime Radiant was a mind control device used by Daneel to control Hari Seldon and the Second Foundation.

The Pi man.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematician who lived from 1887 to 1920. Ramanujan reminds me of Asimov's character, Amaryl. One of the mathematical objects named after Ramanujan is the "Ramanujan prime", the first few of which are 2, 11, 17, 29 and 41.

Like Ramanujan, Amaryl first labored in obscurity then he was "discovered" by a famous mathematician. However, not only was Amaryl a mysteriously good mathematician, but he was also "good with his hands", which means, of course, he was able to make the Prime Radiant. Sure. I suspect Daneel or one of his robotic helpers was involved.

Daneel the telepath

Also like Ramanujan, Amaryl died at a young age before he could fully develop and exploit his quirky mathematical insights. Amaryl coined the term "achaotic equations", which supposedly made possible the prediction of future events by the mathematics of Psychohistory.

Most importantly, Amaryl was able to use the Prime Radiant as a "detector" for identifying the existence of Wanda's telepathic powers. Asimov told readers that it was her uncanny "sense of symmetry" that led Wanda (with the help of the Prime Radiant) to recognize the critical roles that Terminus and Trantor would play in the future because of their positions at the "opposite ends of the Galaxy". Sure.

I prefer to believe that the Prime Radiant was an elaborate joke played by Daneel. Daneel needed to hide from humans the existence of time travel (see Foundations of Eternity) , so he created the pseudoscience of Psychohistory and used it to trick a few key people into believing that mathematics could predict the future. With Daneels "mentalic" abilities, tricking the bumbling humans was as easy as pie.

Alien telepathy. Alien 1: I sense he is not the real Captain of the Enterprise.
Alien 2: Yes. He's able to resist the urge too ravish the slave girl.

Pi Day to Pie Day

Diagram of hierions and sedrons

Albert Einstein was born on March 14th, Pi Day. Pie = 8.53973422267..... (e is Euler's number), so August 5th is Pie Day. I'm currently writing Chapter 5 of Star Dance in which Bet tries to explain to Ghyl her continuing interest in Einstein. She is establishing the needed conditions that will result in the ability of Earthlings to have a basic understanding of hierion physics in the Buld Reality, the universe as we know it. Central to that goal, is that Einstein must move to the United States and provide critical information (the so called 10D Einstein Equation) to the U.S. government.

However, in the Ekcolir Reality, Einstein dies on August 5th, 1922, murdered by a right wing assassin. Paradoxically, as a kind of temporal inversion due to Einstein's death, foreign minister Walter Rathenau does not die in 1922 and he goes on to lead a democratic Germany in the 1930s.....Hitler never comes to power and there is no World War II in the Ekcolir Reality, only the "post-war boom" which drives global industrialization and produces terribly high levels of greenhouse gases.

Source

In the Ekcolir Reality, in 1920, at the age of 41, Einstein travels around the world, visiting both the United States and India.

The hierion mass equation

While he is in India, Einstein meets Ramanujan who, while on his death bed, provides Einstein with an astonishing equation (in the Ekcolir Reality, Einstein calls it the Ramanujan Equation) that predicts the masses of the hierions.

Contact, 1997. The Contact television show.
Background art work: "Ellie's Vision" by Zane Bien.

In Contact, Ellie takes a loooong trip across the galaxy, but by the magic of Hollywood time contraction, it all happens in an instant. I prefer an alternate interpretation: her memories of the journey are artificial, having been implanted in her mind by a nanorobotic endosymbiont.

Hard fantasy adventure

A second Contact movie could reveal that the machine was a device for bringing nanoscopic aliens to Earth. 2017 would be a good year for the release of Contact 2.

Next blog post: April Fools' Day 2015.

Related Reading: Contact the television program

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Worlds in Collision

1958

During the past month I've been exploring the history of the Ekcolir Reality and how Carl Sagan was brought into existence. Here, I want to continue reflecting on the importance of Sagan in the Exode Trilogy, particular the role that he plays in allowing Humanity to learn from the past experience of the Fru'wu. Also, I want to continue placing Exode in its proper cosmological context.

During the past few years, data from the Kepler exoplanet discovery mission has shown that many star systems have "super Earths" in orbits that are close to stars. If that pattern is the default for planet formation, then why is our Solar System different, with 4 relatively small "terrestrial" planets located close to the sun and all the larger planets far away from the sun? Are the 'near super Earth' star systems being detected in high abundance now simply because of the observational method used by the Kepler observations?

Collisions: Velikovsky, Einstein and Sagan 

Etruscan art

The story Star Dance involves a time travel mission back to the start of the 20th century when Carl Sagan's grandparents and Immanuel Velikovsky were living in what would become the Soviet Union. From about 1945 to 1991 the world was locked in a balance of terror while the cold war rivals (USSR and USA) built up their stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

In the Ekcolir Reality, the Etruscan's formed a civilization that came to dominate Europe. There was no Roman Empire and Christianity never became a major influence in Europe. The rate of technological advance was slightly faster in the Ekcolir Reality than in the universe as we know it. Nuclear weapons became available during World War I, but chemical and nuclear weapons were not ever used on Earth. However, rising levels of greenhouse gases, ice cap melting and sea level rise became serious problems during the 20th century in the Ekcolir Reality (see this blog post).

1953

Carl Sagan and other planetary scientists applied the concept of atmospheric gases acting to hold heat next to planets such as Venus. Accounting for the high surface temperature of Venus with the "greenhouse effect" put Sagan in conflict with fans of Velikovsky who imagined that Venus had been careening about the Solar System during historical times.

During the 20th century, scientists including Sagan developed the idea of "nuclear winter" and Isaac Asimov imagined a future in which the surface of Earth became too radioactive to support life. Growing up during the cold war, one of my most chilling science fiction reading experiences was Level 7. In the Exode Trilogy, Earth is caught in a strange temporal attractor that threatens to terminate Humanity either by nuclear catastrophe or by a runaway greenhouse effect.

Worlds in Collision by
Carlos Valenzuela

In order to kick Earth out of that strange attractor and save Humanity, Grean and Trysta must negotiate an end to the Time War.

Velikovsky had a medical education and then he went on to have a rather odd career. In the 1920s he supposedly became involved in a project that was related to the establishment of the Hebrew University. It is fun to imagine that Velikovsky became known to Albert Einstein at this time.

Velikovsky is interesting because of the way he tried to relate events during human history to cosmological events. Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov were also intrigued by the puzzle of how Humanity fits into the grand structure of the cosmos, an intellectual project that provides a foundation for speculative fiction.

In the Exode Trilogy, I have fun imagining that a few Earthlings have occasionally become aware of some of the secret history of Earth (see this blog post).

"Super Earths" close to Gliese 581

What if Velikovsky was told by an Interventionist agent that Venus is a base of operations for the Fru'wu and Jupiter helped form Venus as a planet that is too hot for humans, but a suitable hiding place in the Solar System for a Fru'wu base of operations? Not understanding what he had been told, Velikovsky went on to concoct his own theories.

In "Jupiter’s decisive role in the inner Solar System’s early evolution", Batygin and Laughlin report on their simulations of star system development which suggest that our Solar System might be unusual and particularly suitable for life because of the presence of Jupiter. They suggest that gravitational effects of Jupiter caused the early inner Solar System to become depleted of most of the planetary mass that otherwise might have formed Super Earths close to the Sun.

1954 - original cover art by Ed Emshwiller

But our Solar System does not have any "Super Earth" planets close to the Sun. Instead, we got our relatively small planet Earth and -us, Homo sapiens, a biological species that is able to contemplate and explore the universe.

For the Exode Trilogy, I imagine that Carl Sagan learns the troubled history of the Fru'wu, an alien species with a long history of dealing with carbon dioxide-rich atmospheres.

Fruthwa
source

The modified "Future Science Fiction" magazine cover shown here is a whimsical imagining of Fru'wu explorers in the process of claiming some distant planet for their species.

Sagan visits Tar'tron in the Galactic Core and brings back to Earth a potential solution to our global warming crisis, but will the bumbling Earthlings be able to successfully deploy the alien technology that could save our planet?

Next: observing the 30th anniversary of Carl Sagan's science fiction novel Contact.

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Pop Power

Contact television series.

It finally happened. For the past two years, the most visited page from this blog has been Contact: Coda, but now that post has been overtaken by my Promethean Rorschach Test. This is a great disturbance in the force.

I've never seen the film Prometheus. I have no intention of ever sitting through that movie. I only blogged about Prometheus because I like the general idea of science fiction stories about aliens who came to Earth long ago and who helped bring the human species into existence.

Elizabeth Shaw

My problem with Prometheus is that I can't enjoy horror movies. I love the science fiction genre, but I'm sickened by Hollywood's penchant for endlessly contaminating science fiction with horror.

Pop Culture
I admit: I don't "get" pop culture. Sure, if you blow up enough spaceships and kill enough hapless redshirts and parade around a cute actress in her underwear you have a movie trailer and then a few million people will show up at the cineplex to eat popcorn and sit through your movie. Oh, well, I suppose it must be more than just a few million folks who see something in Prometheus that I just don't understand.

Cognitive dissonance: "What?
A Hollywood film based on a novel
that was written by a Ph.D.?

I suppose it is inevitable that there will be a $equel to Prometheu$. No my$tery there. However, I have zero interest in the burning question: how many tummy and chest-bursting aliens can Ridley Scott parade across the big screen? For me, one was too many.

Carl Sagan
Speaking of sequels, why can't Hollywood ever make meaningful sequels? The movie Contact only got part way through Sagan's novel, so why not make a Contact sequel? Answer: hell has not yet frozen over.

So it is up to us to entertain ourselves with additional Carl Sagan stories. Currently, I'm conspiring to insert Sagan into my science fiction obsession, the Exode Trilogy. In the first two chapters of Star Dance, I've introduced the idea of a mysterious Earthling who is expected to arrive on the planet Tar'tron, in the Galactic Core.

The Dancing Earth

Star Dance (A.K.A. The Dancing Earth) is my attempt to bring together in one story Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance and Carl Sagan. The origins of this effort can be traced back several years to when I created a fan fiction sequel to Asimov's Foundation and Earth.

I could not stand the idea that Asimov died before he was able to find a way to continue his Foundation Saga past the dramatic revelations at the end of Foundation and Earth. I took the liberty to write Asimov himself into Foundations of Eternity.

When I discovered how much fun it was to have Asimov as a character in the Exode Trilogy, I went ahead and imagined that in a previous Reality (what I call the Ekcolir Reality) Jack Vance had a twin brother. The twins (John and Jack) both had writing careers in the Ekcolir Reality, but John managed to slip into the Buld Reality (the world as we know it) and found the Dead Widower Society.

The Mysterious Earthling

Obsidia: waiting for Carl Sagan

In Star Dance, the mysterious Earthling who Obsidia expects to arrive in the Galactic Core is none other than Carl Sagan himself. I've long been intrigued by something that Sagan wrote about (see the start of Chapter 12 in The Demon-Haunted World) in Parade magazine: "Probably a dozen times since their deaths I've heard my mother or  father, in an ordinary, conversational tone of voice, call my name."

In the Exode Trilogy, telepathy evolved naturally on Earth, but I follow in the footsteps of Asimov and Vance and imagine that human telepathic powers were limited and mostly unconscious. What if Sagan had a particularly large dose of telepathic power? And what if there were "aliens" lurking on Earth who had the technological means to "boost" the latent telepathic ability of people like Sagan?

The Hortensia Opera Company

The "problem" is, during the 20th century, Earth was carefully monitored and efforts were made to keep aliens from interfering in the course of events on Earth. However, for Star Dance, I imagine that Ghyl Travoke and his partner Bet Pliqua are sent back through time to 1901 and they become Carl Sagan's "grandparents" (well, it is actually a little more complicated than that!).

Later, after Carl Sagan's "parents" are both dead, Ghyl and Bet are still able to contact Carl and help him find his way to Tar'tron.

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious"

Two Einsteins: 1891

In 2012 I toyed with the idea of some special connection between Elsa Einstein and her cousin Albert. As cousins, Elsa and Albert knew each other as children. When Albert was 40, he married Elsa (1919), but I imagined that something unusual happened to Elsa in 1910, allowing her to remember a suppressed memory and prompting her to write to Albert.

Dualities: wave/particle, gravity/acceleration

Meanwhile, in New York City, Ghyl and Bet have successfully assembled the genetic material for a new Earthling, "the mysterious Earthling" who must travel to Tar'tron and discover the Buldoon Arques. Having completed her mission in New York, Bet "dies" in 1909 and moves to Europe. Bet must remind Elsa to get in contact with Albert...she had not written to Albert since 1902. In 1902, when Ghyl and Bet sent Lieserl to the Core, they had also made use of Elsa to get Albert thinking about the idea that light can behave like quanta of energy.

Gravitational lens; Hubble Space Telescope

Space Dance
In 1910, Albert has one more task to complete before the Buld Reality, the world as we know it, can come into existence. Bet again makes use of Elsa to guide Albert's thinking towards a general theory of relativity. Bet arranges for Elsa to invite Albert to a performance by the Ballets Russes and Bet is able to shape an analogy between dance and gravitational lensing in Albert's mind.

Next: the theory of Temporal Amplification

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