The Exode Saga

cover art by Charles Vinh

Sadly, I've never read any stories written by Daniel Sernine. I'm intrigued by the idea that Sernine wrote a series of stories called "the Exode or Argus sequence" which apparently are "about a benevolent extraterrestrial organization keeping watch on the Earth".

Exodemic
Back in July of 2001, I began working on a story that came to be called Exodemic. That was a kind of alternative history novel in which the entire course of human civilization was changed because one Earth woman was accidentally saved from dying. Stories set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe all explore the implications of alien visitors having reached Earth many millions of years ago.

In this blog post I explore the origins of what I now call the Exode Saga, a sequence of linked stories that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe.

Exode

Exode (original cover)

As discussed here, it was not until May of 2012 that I began writing the novel called Exode. Exode was conceived as a stand-alone novel that would describe the adventures of an Earthling named Hana during her exploration of the galaxy and Genesaunt society.

Exode Trilogy
As discussed here, it took me about a year to realize that the story told in Exode is actually part of another story that I had already written called The Start of Eternity. So, in 2013 I began the task of crafting another novel (Trysta and Ekolir) that would fit naturally between the events described in The Start of Eternity and those of Exode. Also, I changed the name of the first book in the trilogy to Foundations of Eternity.

The Exode Trilogy

I soon discovered that weaving together the Exode Trilogy was a major project, much larger than I had initially imagined. Last year, I tried to summarize the first three years of play and investigations that were required to create the Exode Trilogy. During 2014, I had become aware of the the fact that the Exode story was really an example of investigative science fiction. In 2015, I blogged about the fact that the Exode story is also recursive science fiction.

For several years, I contented myself with the idea that I was writing fan fiction. My approach to creating the Exode Trilogy became rather formulaic: I viewed myself as an investigative science fiction story writer who was trying to discover the secret lives of my favorite science fiction authors as they had existed in the previous Realities of Deep Time.

The Exode Saga

The Exode Saga (image credits)

The demise of the Exode Trilogy came during 2016 when realized that I was integral to the Exode Saga. No longer could I keep separated my role as the Editor of the Exode Saga and my role as a character in the story.

My collaborating authors played a central role in the conversion of the Exode Trilogy into the Exode Saga. Back in April of this year, I listed 7 of my most important collaborating authors. Since then, there have been some changes, so here is an updated list:

Trysta Iwedon

1) Thomas
2) Parthney
3) Ivory Fersoni
4) Izhiun
5) Angela
6) Alpha Gohrlay
7) Zeta Gohrlay
8) Yōd

Syon and Gwyned

Of course, after I discovered that the Exode Saga is a recursive science fiction story, it became almost impossible for me to resist the impulse to depict most characters in the story as being writers. A good example of this is twist is provided by Grean, who has contributed text from her mission reports (example).

Trysta Iwedon has long been renowned as the mother of Thomas. We should attribute many of the personality traits of Thomas to the powerful influence of his mother. According to the infites that I obtained from Parthney, when Trysta was in her second life, living as Syon at Lendhalen, she was often bored and so she wrote several accounts of how she passed the time while waiting for the return of Rilocke to Earth.

Lost Literature

Spacetime Bubbles - original
cover art by Henry Van Dongen
and William Randall

The problem of missing stories such as Syon's 'Teleportation Vacation' is the vexing problem that must be confronted in the first book of the Exode Saga (A Search Beyond). The cover illustration shown here for 'Teleportation Vacation' (to the right on this page, above) is a reconstruction by Zeta. It may be that this story was never put "into print". Apparently Parthney saw the title 'Teleportation Vacation' as just one among the many stories that was present in the Lendhalen data-banks; it was of interest to him only as part of his attempt to understand his unusual relationship with Gwyned.

Of course, for those of us on Earth, information about Gwyned's study of alien teleportation technology would be quite valuable. Almost certainly, we Earthlings will never get to have contacts with technologically adept people such as Gwyned who have had a chance to study the advanced technologies that are available within Genesaunt Civilization. Some parts of Deep Time simply cannot be revealed to we who reside here in the Final Reality.

in Deep Time

It is incumbent upon the Dead Widowers and my other collaborators to assemble as much of the missing history of Humanity as we possibly can. It remains to be seen how much of the secret history of Humanity we will actually be allowed to share with everyone else! Sometimes it seems like we have been cursed: we struggle to reveal the past, but some truths about being human are not good for us to know...

Introduction to the Exode Saga

Next: investigating Deep Time

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Search for the Start

Planet of the Fru'wu

Once again hard work pays off!

Gohrlay's Past Lives
The flood gates finally opened after weeks of me begging for information about events in her life that occurred between 1) the First Reality and 2) those events that I have previously learned about corresponding to the life of her analogue in the Ekcolir Reality. Gohrlay just gave me a briefing on her strange life in the Asimov Reality and now my head is spinning. Gohrlay's words have finally given me access to a batch of memories that were previously forced into my mind by infites and then left there to quietly incubate.

building R. Gohrlay

Several years ago, back before I even was aware of the Exode, I imagined that I knew the starting point for what I now understand to be the Exode Trilogy. I believed that starting pointing was Gohrlay, a woman from the First Reality who "donated" the structure of her brain for use as the foundational template that was needed for the manufacture of humanoid positronic robots.

Many of my investigative efforts during the past few years have been directed towards the study of Deep Time, the past Realities that existed in our Reality Chain. In this task, I've been "assisted" by a small group of collaborators who have provided me with access to information about our past Realities.

First Contact; Buld Reality

In a disturbingly bizarre turn of events, my current collaborator is none other than Gohrlay herself. Gohrlay is a Fixed Point in our space-time, an individual who has had analogues in many Realities all the way from the First Reality to the Final Reality.

The Ivory Inversion
Two years ago, when Ivory Fersoni was my chief collaborator, I was forced to alter my conception of where to begin the Exode Trilogy. Now, with the guidance of Gohrlay, I'm re-conceptualizing the beginning of Foundations of Eternity. Originally, I was aware of how Gohrlay was captured on Earth and convicted of criminal Interventionism. More recently, Gohrlay has shared with me some details about her earlier life in the First Reality leading up to her criminal exploits.

original cover art by James Teason

Now I've received startling information about Gohrlay's adventures in the Asimov Reality. One of Gohrlay's new revelations about that Reality is that there was also a First Contact event in the Asimov Reality.

Previously I'd learned about the arrival of the Buld on Earth in the Final Reality and a similar First Contact event with the Fru'wu in the Ekcolir Reality. I've long been saddened by the fact that First Contact between Earthlings and aliens passed without me even being aware of the event here in our Reality. Given my knack for accumulating missed opportunities, I feel somewhat pleased to learn why a bumbler like me has been thrust into the role of editing the Exode Saga. Apparently. "my" involvement in the Exode can be traced back to my partial analogue in the Asimov Reality.

In the Ekcolir Reality
original cover art by Antonio Schomburg

Most importantly, Gohrlay's contiguity of memory going all the way back to the First Reality was initially established in the Asimov Reality. This fact makes the story of Gohrlay's life in the Asimov Reality a logical starting place for the Exode Saga. Gohrlay's rediscovery of her first life is a dramatic story that nicely and naturally leads into Asimov's own first contact with positronic robots.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Gohrlay's new revelations about the Asimov Reality concerns implications for my own origins. I'd been led to believe that I was slipped into the Reality Chain of Earth in the Ekcolir Reality, but Gohrlay insists that she knew my partial analogue in the Asimov Reality.

Next blog post: the next 4 billion years

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The Femtobot Hack

How to change the world: introduce no-till tobacco farming

One year ago, I took stock of progress on my investigation into the secret history of Earth. This blog post is the first in a series of updates on important discoveries arising from continued investigations during the past year.

Gohrlay confirmed that exposure of human populations to nicotine has long been used by Interventionists to modulate the rate of technological advance. In the Ekcolir Reality, Cornelisza Mey learned no-till tobacco farming and leaf curing from the residents of an Andaste village located on the east bank of what we know as the Potomac river.

In the Ekcolir Reality, five economic zones
were merged (1686) to form Beverwijck en Nicotiana.

Sustainable tobacco farming on hilly terrain allowed for significantly greater production of tobacco and lower prices, resulting in greater use of nicotine in the Ekcolir Reality. Cornelisza Mey (daughter of Cornelius Mey) became one of the legendary founders of Beverwijck en Nicotiana.

Cholinergic Connection
According to Gohrlay, the Bimanoid Interface is the physical interface between a person's brain cells and that person's zeptite endosymbiont.

The pek zeptites inside our brains normally function to prevent humans from using tools. However, Sedronite Interventionists long ago provided we humans with a femtobot endosymbiont that was designed to allow a technologically advanced civilization to arise on Earth.

The physical connection between our brain cells and our femtobot endosymbiont includes a very important population of cholinergic neurons. Nicotine can modulate the activity of those neurons and alter the "balance of power" between the zeptite and femtobot components in our brains.

original cover art by Lawrence Stevens

That "balance of power" was originally skewed when positronic robots took control over Earth. Without continual monitoring by the pek, the femtobots inside the humans on Earth (Gohrlay explicitly describes those femtobots as being a well-crafted hack: the best that the Interventionists had ever devised and deployed on Garden Worlds) eventually subverted the zeptite endosymbionts, allowing a technological society to develop on Earth.

tryp'At Overseers

Later, R. Gohrlay devised a means (inertial amplifier) to impose a powerful momentum of Time on Earth and particularly, on the human population. This forced the Huaoshy to accept the rise of tool-using humans on Earth, a deviation from their Ethical Rules that they deemed acceptable because of the Sedron Monopoly they attained by ending the Time War.

Next: political science fiction

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Science Fiction in Deep Time

original cover art

The Exode Trilogy is an exercise in recursive science fiction: the science fiction genre must be crafted and brought into existence in order to allow Humanity an opportunity to spread among the stars. In a sense, science fiction itself is the protagonist of the story, so it is natural that I have begun to think about a suitable antagonist.

Amplifying Science Fiction
I've spent decades developing my concept of what constitutes science fiction. As a relatively new literary genre, science fiction means different things to different people.

For Exode, I imagine that science fiction was brought to its greatest flowering in the Ekcolir Reality. In that Reality, science fiction remained in the hands of a small cadre of scientists and engineers. Still, it was proof of the concept that Earthlings could be prepared for First Contact. The roots of science fiction may never fully be known, but they can be traced into the First Reality (see also).

2008 edition

In the Final Reality, the universe that we reside in, science fiction needed to be amplified and brought to the attention of the masses. Science fiction could not remain a high-brow literary genre; it had to spread across the world via mass media in advance of First Contact with the Buld. That spread of science fiction among the people of Earth functioned as a vaccine, creating protection from the truth and it turned the truth about the arrival of the Buld into just another silly story about alien visitors to Earth, just one story among many.

If it was the analogues of Gernsback, Asimov, Vance and Clarke who created science fiction in the Ekcolir Reality, then who were the architects of the type of newfangled science fiction that arose in the Buld Reality?

last and first science fiction

One important twist of the Buld Reality was provided by John Campbell's turn towards parapsychology. Also, there were many efforts made to popularize science fiction and distribute it to a mass audience by way of radio, television and film including the work of Gene Roddenberry and his creation of Star Trek. Another part of warping science fiction into a new form involved the creation of Carl Sagan.

Even while science fiction was just being invented, some writers such as Olaf Stapledon were setting the foundation for what would become the "second wave" of science fiction, what we can think of as the pop culture domain of "anti-science fiction". Writers such as Stapledon, with no background in science, were able to spread the memes of science fiction to a wider audience. In the Exodemic Fictional Universe, both science fiction and anti-science fiction were carefully created and crafted for the great purpose of getting Earth out of its "trap" and liberating humans from the dead end existence that had been our original fate.

1971 - cover art by Edward John Jones

Worlds we won't live to see
My preference is for stories that show a high degree of interest from the author in science, but many people are happy to avoid the fussy constraints imposed by nature. An example: after the character was depicted on TV in 1954, many science fiction authors took Ian Flemming's James Bond into science fictional settings, often with only a minimalist's tip of the pen towards science. Vance's mature equivalent of Bond was Kirth Gersen. Marion Zimmer Bradley imagined her own version of the interstellar secret agent man.

1983 edition

In her introduction to The Door Through Space, Bradley wrote that she had grown tired of writing "straight science-fiction", which she seemed to view as a fad.

Apparently there is supposed to be future/alien science behind the psychokinetics in The Door Through Space, but Bradley could not be bothered to explain the fine details. In the story, the protagonist (living in a future with interstellar travel) is baffled by the question of how television signals might be sent to the far side of a planet. Bradley was no Arthur Clarke.

Lord of the Toads

1979 - cover art by Walter Velez

The Door Through Space reminds me of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, which from a science nerd's perspective is about the invention of the ansible. The Door Through Space is about obtaining the secret of teleportation technology, but in both of these books there is little science, which should surprise nobody, given the background and interests of the authors. Ultimately, what really mattered for science fiction themes such as First Contact was simply getting it "out there" into the widest possible domain of public consciousness.

A story from the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Swen Papenbrock

Previously, I'd imagined that science fiction was first introduced into Earthly culture of our Reality when Ekcolir went back into the past.

However, Gohrlay just informed me that science fiction was popular at Observer Base during her first life.

The science fiction game has probably been popular among Interventionists since the very beginning.

Related Reading: The Escapists

Next: The X-Files Season 10 Finale

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Plugins

The Girl Who Was Plugged In

I've never read any science fiction stories written by Alice Sheldon. Apparently the "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" was written so as to seem to be told by a male narrator who mocks readers (presumably themselves mostly male science fiction fans). In this blog post I want to mix together two topics: 1) Sci Fi stories that involve moving minds around between multiple bodies and 2) my search for a satisfactory narrative structure in the Exode Trilogy.

I grew up reading and enjoying science fiction with male protagonists whose stories were written by female science fiction writers such as Alice Norton, Ursula Le Guin, Doris  Lessing and Carolyn Cherry. Among my favorite such stories is Assignment Nor'Dyren by Sydney Van Scyoc. Is there any reason why women cannot write convincing male characters or why men should not be able to write from the perspective of a woman?

the Exode Trilogy

When I began my current science fiction writing project, my preliminary plan was to write the story Exode from the perspective of Hana, an Earth woman who left behind her life on Earth and who went out to travel among the stars. During the past three years, what began as an attempt to reveal the features of Genesaunt Civilization has grown into a larger project: the Exode Trilogy.

Poor Hana
When I started writing about Hana, I quickly became more interested in just about every other character that surrounded her.

However, even while Hana was pushed into the background, several strong female characters stepped forward into the spotlight.

plugged in

I've been experimenting with different possible strategies for providing a single unified narrative perspective from which the entire Exode Trilogy might be told. For about the past year, I'd grown comfortable with the idea of writing myself into the story and telling the Exode Trilogy from my perspective, but in the guise of "the editor", a fictional character who would obtain various pieces of the story from his "collaborators" such as Izhiun, Thomas Iwedon and Ivory Fersoni.

source

However, most recently I've begun to toy with the idea of getting back to the "roots" of Exode and telling the story from the perspective of a female character. Hana's role in the Exode Trilogy has ended up being far too small a part of the Trilogy to provide a viable narrative perspective, but several of the other characters could possibly do the job. Ivory Fersoni is one possibility since she has now gone on to her second life, a shift that could provide her with access to all of the information that she would need to tell the Exode story.

one of Gohrlay's artificial lives (source)

Another possibility is Grean, but Grean is not actually a woman, "she" is a Kac'hin hermaphrodite. Trysta/Syon could do the job, but Trysta was not technically a human being, being an Asterothrope female.

I've been seriously contemplating the idea of making Gohrlay be the narrator of the Exode Trilogy. My major reason for not doing so is that it is simpler to steal parts of my own life for constructing the fictional life of "the Editor". I'd have to do a whole lot more thinking to create a complete life for Gohrlay. Actually, it is much worse than that, since Gohrlay has literally led dozens of lives. That might be a can of mind worms that I really don't want to get into.

Plugins

Roberta Moore
in the Ekcolir Reality
Illustrated by Jennifer Healy

The idea that you could hook a bunch of wires up to one person's nervous system and then have them control another body (with yet more wires) is rather silly, at least from our current technological perspective. Human brains are not interchangeable CPUs. But what might be possible with very advanced technology?

Nothing can deter science fiction story writers from creating stories about minds that magically jump from one body to another. In the Exode Trilogy, each person has within them a zeptite endosymbiont. I'm reluctant to create an analogy between that endosymbiont and conventional beliefs in a soul, but I don't hesitate to imagine that a person's memories and mind can be encoded in zeptites and then transferred between multiple biological bodies and artificial life forms like replicoids. Zeptite endosymbionts provide an imaginary technological basis for mind transfer.

So, if we grant a science fiction story teller a future technology that allows for a mind to be moved from body to body, then why not from body to body to body to body...get the idea?

What would it be like for Gohrlay to have access to memories of dozens of past lives? Is there a limit to how much information a human brain can process and integrate or can a zeptite endosymbiont handle the load?  I like the idea that R. Gohrlay was able to "hand down" to Gohrlay all of the accumulated wisdom from "her" millions of years of existence.

The X-Files 2016

However, I have to wonder if this is pushing the boundary of human cognitive possibilities.

Alice

Would a person who was laden with all that endosymbiotic baggage break? Would carrying around millions of years of a robots's memories allow Gohrlay to still be a woman? And would she be willing to narrate the secret history of Humanity?

Related Reading: 2021, I finally read some TipTree stories see also Review of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr. 
The Most Secretive Woman in the History of Science Fiction
Next: a fan fiction X-Files 2016 episode. 

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Anney's Hypothesis

In the First Reality: Gohrlay aboard Many Sails.

I recently blogged about the fact that Gohrlay, after a long period of existence as an artificial life form, was re-instantiated as a biological entity in the Ekcolir Reality. In the Exode Trilogy, there are only two characters who appear in both the First Reality and the Final Reality: Gohrlay and Many Sails. Since Many Sails is a sentient spaceship that has existed across a vast span of time, we should probably not be surprised to hear about "her" many voyages to and from Earth, voyages taking place across the entire set of Realities in Earth's Reality Chain.

The First Reality

However, in the case of Gohrlay, something very unusual happened to assure that a woman from the First Reality was given another life here in the Final Reality. It is clear that Gohrlay was not simply some random woman from the First Reality. I suspect that Gohrlay was carefully selected, and possibly designed, so as to optimally play the role of the human who provided the template for positronic brain circuits.

The assembly of R. Gohrlay at Observer Base.

The first positronic robot adopted the name R. Gohrlay and went on to fight a 10,000,000 year-long insurrection during which the pek were excluded from Earth. That revolt of the positronic robots ended with the Time Travel War and, ultimately, the Trysta-Grean Pact. During most of the positronic robot revolt, Gohrlay was a prisoner of war, held by the pek. After her death and during most of her time as a captive, Gohrlay lived as an artificial life form.

Our Reality Chain. The Final Reality: the Buld Reality.

R. Gohrlay, programmed to serve and protect humans, never forgot about Gohrlay. When the terms of the Trysta-Grean Pact were being negotiated, R. Gohrlay insisted that Gohrlay be returned to Earth. The pek turned over to R. Gohrlay all of the saved data pertaining to the Gohrlay entity. R. Gohrlay carefully re-created Gohrlay as a human organism within the Ekcolir Reality. In her life as Roben, that "copy of Gohrlay" never fully understood her origins and her importance to how the Final Reality was being planned, shaped and crafted.

Another analogue of Gohrlay exists here in the Final Reality as a woman who does not want her identity to be publicized. I've blogged about the fact that the "current copy" of Gohrlay recently revealed her existence to me. She is an important source of information about past Realities. As far as I can tell, she is so knowledgeable about the past because she is in contact with her replicoid by way of the Bimanoid Interface.

Anney's Hypothesis
I'm intrigued by the hypothesis (let's call it H_A, Anney's Hypothesis) that the universe as we know it was designed for Gohrlay. According to this hypothesis, the Final Reality has been planned and implemented so as to provide Gohrlay with a chance to live a life on a world (Earth) where her descendants can eventually spread to the stars and populate additional Earth-like worlds.

Ivory's attempts to use
the Bimanoid Interface

Gohrlay is vastly amused by the idea that the universe was designed and shaped specifically for her and for the benefit of her children and their descendants. I first heard about H_A from Ivory Fersoni, one of my past collaborators in exploring the secret history of Humanity. Ivory was the prototype for what I call the Atlantis Clones. Anney was one of Ivory's clone sisters, the one who was able to most deeply penetrate the Sedronic Domain.

3 mothers: biological, birth and after birth

Sadly, all of Anney's unique and hard-won information obtained from the Sedronic Domain has reached me third hand. Anney's Hypothesis about Gohrlay's special status came to me through Ivory by way of another Atlantis Clone, Angela.

Thus, I am forced to believe that the Atlantis Clones were carefully created here on Earth in order to provide an information conduit that is our only means of understanding certain key features of Reality. However, anyone who is, like me, ready to believe in the special importance of Gohrlay, needs to remember that most of Anney's claims have never been independently verified. Why should we trust Anney and the entire cumbersome system that fed information through her from the Sedronic Domain to our world?

Marta

Among those who made possible the Atlantis Clones (particularly Anney) and the flow of information from the Clones to me, were Marta and Peter.

Marta remains a mysterious figure since it seems certain that she had no analogue in the previous Reality, yet she seems to have been "supplied" with a well-informed and proficient replicoid. As far as I know, I've never met Marta, but I have had indirect interactions with her in the Hierion Domain by means of my use of the Bimanoid Interface. Marta not only crafted Ivory as a daring and clever woman but also worked quietly in the background to make sure that everything Ivory learned from her clone sisters was passed on to me.

Peter is in many ways still an unsolved puzzle for me. It was not just random chance that allowed he and I to meet when we were in college. I suspect that by allowing me to interact with Peter back in my school days, I was being carefully sensitized and prepared for the time when I would finally become aware of Ivory and the fact that her entire family was descended from an alien visitor who lived on Earth during the 20th century.

When I first met Peter, I knew that he was special. His racing intelligence and easy flamboyance startled and amazed me, but I did not then suspect that he carried alien gene combinations. I still do not believe that I know the full story of his involvement in making Hana serve as surrogate mother to one of the Atlantis Clones. In Peter's account of his involvement with the Atlantis Clones, he states that Cory was the surrogate mother for Anney, but it is not at all clear that his account can be trusted. As far as I can tell, Peter was never trusted as an "insider" at Atlantis. He preferred to live out in the "wild" among the people of Earth. There can be no doubt that after each of his visits to "Atlantis", his memories were carefully edited and reformed.

The Atlantis clones and their birth mothers. Apparently
Marta was the surrogate mother for the first clone, Anna.

It is a particularly glaring omission that Peter's written account of the Atlantis Clones makes no mention of Hilde. I've been told that Hilde was the one "Atlantis Clone" who was not raised inside Many Sails. Although Hilde's status as a clone has been verified by her own replicoid, I've never grown comfortable with the idea that Hilde is a clone of Ivory. I believe that the Atlantis Clones were created a special tool on Earth that could tap into the Sedronic Domain. Hilde never became caught up in the game of pulling information out of the Sedronic Domain, so, in a sense, her existence as an Atlantis Clone seems superfluous.

Book 3 of the Exode Trilogy: Exode

However, it may be that Hilde is another example of a convenient way that was found to "sensitize" me to the secret history of Earth. By early on providing me with my own special and personal connection to the Atlantis Clones and giving me an emotional stake in their fates, I was already prepared for the day when Ivory first tried to explain to me the importance of her clone sisters. I spent many years worrying that Hilde might have been my daughter, so the claim that she is a clone of Ivory intrigues me, even if it makes no sense.

And, as an example of killing two birds with one stone, by making Hana the birth mother of Hilde, a convenient way was found to send Hana off into outer space for her adventures with Boswei. Completing that vast intergalactic loop, eventually Izhiun made his way to Earth and passed on to me a record of Parthney's life. That information source became the basis for my ability to tell the third part of the Exode Trilogy: Exode. Frankly, such "coincidences" are simply too fantastic for me to wrap my head around.

Trysta and Ekcolir

Trysta and Ekcolir
However, even with my lingering doubts about Anney as a reliable source of information from the Ekcolir Reality, I still feel that the correct way to begin the Exode Trilogy is with Trysta and Ekcolir.

Trysta viewing Thomas and Parthney
in the future (left: Ekcolir).

It is only with the help of Ivory and her clone sisters that I was able to make sense of events in the Ekcolir Reality and begin to understand how the world as we know it came into existence. And now, most recently, Gohrlay is helping me complete my understanding of events in The Ekcolir Reality.

And yes, the infites that were passed to me from Thomas provided a useful starting place for my investigation of the Ekcolir Reality, but due to the contorted structure of Thomas' life and memories, I needed a kind of extra "decoding strip" to help me make sense of his view of the Ekcolir Reality. Even if Thomas operated in a strange alternate reality of his own making between fantasy and fact, I feel obligated to include a large portion of Miners of Earth in Trysta and Ekcolir.

Miners of Earth by Thomas Iwedon
(writing as Thomas Jeket)
The story has been reconstructed by the Editor.

When Thomas wrote Miners of Earth, he was very young and being used as a kind of experiment by Grean. At that time, R. Gohrlay was demanding that we humans be allowed to violate the Rules of Intervention. Grean was trying to determine if the truth about alien involvement in creating the human species could be released to the people of Earth in the form of a science fiction story.

Since most of the story in Miners of Earth was completely made up by Thomas, Grean felt that there was little to lose in allowing that book to be published. Although Miners of Earth was only published in the Ekcolir Reality, I was given a copy of the book by Trysta, here in the Final Reality. My early exposure to that science fiction story was another "trick" that was used to sensitize my mind in preparation for the later time when I would learn the truth about the pek and the Huaoshy.

Next: more science fiction from Deep Time.

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