Showing posts with label sentient plants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sentient plants. Show all posts

Dec 28, 2024

2024 Again

see the blog post "1924"
 Year in review. By tradition, each year I have a blog post in which I summarize the past 12 months in blogging here at the wikifiction blog and also take note of the blog pages that have had the most page views (last year's review: 2023).

 January Jumps. Why did I include amphibian Merovae in my science fiction story "The Fesarians"? I'll blame the Aquans, an aquatic human variant imagined by Kōbō Abe for his novel Inter Ice Age 4. My year in blogging began with a commentary on Inter Ice Age 4. First published in 1958 - 1959, Inter Ice Age 4 included the idea of using computers to predict the future. Isaac Asimov's earlier novel The End of Eternity had previously explored the idea of using an advanced computer to predict alternate timelines, what Asimov called Realities.

Time Portal
 Synapex Linkages. The most visited wikifiction blog post in January was "Synapex Time", which has Part 4 of my science fiction story Time Portal. In that part of the story, R. Nyrtia is shown to be moving Dr. Twissell through time, using him as a means to spread some key tryp'At gene patterns that are useful for human telepathy. In 2025, I hope to continue the tale of Twissell's jumps through time, but sometimes I begin a fiction writing project that gets delayed for many years....

 February Fail. For example, in 2012 I began making plans for a sequel to the novel "Assignment Nor'Dyren", a 1973 science fiction novel by Sydney J. Van Scyoc. I was again thinking about that project in February of 2024 (see Exobiologist). However, in February I was terribly distracted by AI tools; chatbots and image generating software.

Claude the chatbot.
The most visited blog post for February was "Claude the Chatbot". Here is part of a typical conversation with the Claude chat bot...

Me (in February 2024): Does Anthropic provide any documentation for their Claude user interface?

Claude (February 2024): No, Anthropic does not provide any public documentation for a "Claude user interface" because I do not actually have a user interface that people can access.

While chatting with these Large Language Models, it is very challenging to keep in mind the fact that these chatbots have no actual intelligence. They have a complete lack of understanding of what they are saying and often fail spectacularly to produce useful output.

When I checked back on Claude today (in December), the default version was Sonnet version 3.5. Back in March I had access to version 3.0

Claude Shannon by Mr. Wombo.
 Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Yes, you can find documentation about using the Claude interface at https://support.anthropic.com and technical documentation at https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/. These resources cover topics like conversation basics, prompting best practices, and API details.

Me: I went to those two URLs and found no description of the Claude user interface.

Claude: I apologize for my incorrect assumption about the documentation. You're right - I checked those URLs and they don't contain specific documentation about the Claude chat interface elements and features. I should not have claimed they did.

Smuggling nanites.
 March Madness: More Models. The most popular blog post in March was "TNS 31", which has the 31st and final chapter of a science fiction story called "The Nanite Smuggler". I wrote that 61,000 word-long story in collaboration with the Gemini and Claude chatbots (read the entire story here). The story is set in the year 2040, when a young woman, Tyhry, tries to obtain advanced nanotechnology from aliens.

 The Tooth Brush Problem. My experiment of collaborating with chatbots to write a novel taught me that these Large Language Models are not good story tellers. They can't understand anything, particularly the subjects that I want to explore in my stories. The chatbots can churn out huge amounts of dreck, but I usually have to rewrite it in order to remake the chatbot output into something that I can tolerate.

 April Alice. Also in that "TNS 31" blog post were ideas for a sequel to "The Nanite Smuggler" which became a story called Vythoth the Chresmoscopist. That blog post with the first part of Vythoth the Chresmoscopist ("Nymerya Coryn") was the most visited blog post in April 🏆. "Nymerya Coryn" is the name of a religious robot (a name that Gemini invented). I've relegated the chatbots to mundane tasks like generating names for characters in my stories. Vythoth is a Fru'wu who explains in Part 5 of the story, "We Fru'wu have a device that allows us to View future events; the Chresmoscope." 

Figure 1. To be continued.
I've never completed Vythoth the Chresmoscopist. As shown in the image to the left (Figure 1), in April of 2024 I made plans for Tyhry could first obtain some useful information nanites (infites) from Vythoth the Fru'wu. My plan was for those alien infites to then make it possible for Tyhry to enter into the Asimov Reality Simulation and obtain other infites from Alice Wroke that would provide Tyhry with the required information for how to make a fully functional interstellar spaceship (this is a work in progress; see "D*", below).

Tyhry's alien body modification.
Image generated by Mr. Wombo.
 May: Mr. Wombo. The most visited blog post from May is Vythoth, which has Part 5 of the science fiction story Vythoth the Chresmoscopist. Tyhry establishes some tentative telepathic linkage to the mind of Vythoth, who then explains, "We Fru'wu have a device that allows us to View future events; the Chresmoscope."

Most of May was devoted to developing Vythoth the Chresmoscopist, but I also published a blog post called Image Gallery which holds 340 AI-generated images such as the one that is shown to the right. Sometimes Mr. Wombo generates images that do not fit the story that I am currently writing, but those images might be useful in the future. The image that is shown to the right might illustrate a bad dream that is induced in Tyhry when she has a vision of the future time when she uses medical nanites to revert her body to its tryp'At form. Why settle for just 4 breasts when you could have 8?

Figure 2. Under construction.

 June Jarnell. So far, I've published the first 8 parts of Vythoth the Chresmoscopist on this blog. Part 8 of the story was published in June. At that time, I wrote part of an account of how two Felydyans, Sorsyph and Oyub, acting as agents of Manny the bumpha, were able to help get Tyhry on the right track for discovering the secret of using sedrons for interstellar space travel (see Figure 2). 

Figure 3. image source
Some day I hope to complete Vythoth the Chresmoscopist, possibly using ideas from another story called "D*". In "D*", Tyhry visits the Asimov Reality (via Reality Simulation) and discovers the existence a secret sedron mining facility that is used by the Jarnell Corporation to make interstellar space travel possible in that Reality. The Jarnell Corporation is a front operation created by Manny the bumpha.

The most visited blog post in June is The Fesarians, a page I used to develop my thinking about a new Star Trek fan-fiction science fiction story that is called The Fesarians. I was inspired to start writing that story after I began my 2024 Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens (SIHA) and once again contemplated the idea of awarding another retro-SIHA for the year 2024.

9484 BCE (image source)
 July Jumble. Part 1 of The Fesarians was published in July in a blog post called A Fesarian Reality, which is the most visited blog post for that month. As fan fiction, The Fesarians is a sequel story for a Star Trek  episode called "The Corbomite Menouver". The Fesarians is set in the future of the Ekcolir Reality where I imagine that Star Trek's Vulcans are replaced by the tryp'At.

For The Fesarians, I imagine that Balok's gigantic interstellar spaceship has a "crew" that consists of a diverse and jumbled collection of many different alien species who have been collected from various worlds of the galaxy, including some humans who Balok collects in the year 9484 BCE (see both Figure 3, above, and the image to the left). Balok has advanced technology that allows for the creation of duplicate copies of the planet Earth.

 August All-stars. The most visited blog post from August is Science Fiction Baseball. That was the second of two baseball-themed blog posts from the summer of 2024 (the first was Alien Ghosts On Second). What if an alien such as Balok visited Earth and stayed around just to have fun playing baseball (see the image that is shown to the right)? In my imagination, an alien from a distant exoplanet with advanced technologies could easily become an All-star baseball player on Earth.

A plant-machine. image source
Also in August was a blog post called Book-Scrolls and Plant-Machines in which I continued my efforts to trick image-generating software into visually depicting future technologies that exist only in my imagination. Software like WOMBO Dream has an amazing ability to take a new idea and make it look old. For The Fesarians, I imagine that there is an advanced alien species on the exoplanet Elemacha-z. Those aliens prefer to shape their nanite components into the form of a plant-like creature, so those intelligent aliens initially go unnoticed by the human colonists. The image that is shown to the left plays around with the idea of a technologically advanced plant species.

collecting a Noema
 September Spies. The most visited blog post in September is The Xylo Clones, which includes Part 4 of science fiction story The Fesarians. When the human colonists on the distant exoplanet Elemacha-z finally realize that the plant-like Noema are highly intelligent, they attempt to establish telepathic contact with the aliens (see the image that is shown to the right).

image source

I love the idea that R. Nyrtia the positronic robot and Manny the bumpha can infiltrate human society and live among humans without being recognized as artificial life forms. That theme is included in my story "D*", but there is also a scene in The Fesarians where Nyrtia secretly uses the bodily form of Talia's sister, Gyulya, and spies on the colonists.

While thinking about Nyrtia's ability to secretly infiltrate the small human colony on Elemacha-z, I began imagining a computerized game called "Infiltrate" which would be about aliens who infiltrate human society on Earth (see the image that is shown to the left).

game token
 Another Game.
I asked Gemini to create a version of Monopoly based on an artificial intelligence theme. One of Gemini's proposed property sets was "The Stable Diffusion District" with these three properties: Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Dream by WOMBO. Gemini suggested six tokens: 1) The Neural Net Node: a small, multifaceted metallic sphere with glowing lines crisscrossing its surface, resembling a simplified neural network node.  2) The Quantum Bit: a translucent cube with swirling colors inside, representing the superposition of states in a quantum bit (qubit).  3) The Robot Arm: a miniature, articulated robotic arm with a claw at the end, symbolizing automation and AI in robotics.  4) The Holographic AI: a small, transparent pyramid that projects a shimmering, holographic image of an eye, representing virtual assistants and advanced interfaces.  5) The Data Packet: a sleek, rectangular prism with a stream of binary code flowing across its surface, symbolizing the flow of information in AI systems.  6) The AI Chip: a tiny, gold-plated microchip with intricate circuitry etched on its surface, representing the hardware that powers AI algorithms. I had Mr. Wombo generate images for these sic tokens. Gemini also generated a game board and I pasted in the AI-generated tokens (see the image, below):

The Gemini chatbot suggested that the "GO" space be called "Launch the Singularity".

Xylo is carefully monitoring an
experiment with a telepathic Neoma.
 October Operation. The most visited blog post in October is Colorize. In that blog post I had fun using WOMBO Dream to colorize some old black and white story illustrations. One of my favorite images that came out of that experiment is show to the right.

Pregnant plant woman (image source).
Also in October, I had an entire blog post (called Kwononk) in which I explored the concept of an alien Halloween, from the perspective of image-generating software like WOMBO Dream. The image to the left shows an alien plant-like creature that has undergone an abdominal surgical operation revealing her baby.

John and Vera: a breeding
experiment with an alien plant.
 November Neoma. The most visited blog post in November is "Trying to Connect" which contains a rather looong discussion of plans for Part 6 of my science fiction story called The Fesarians. Since The Fesarians involves the plant like alien Neoma, I felt obligated to extensively comment on the John Carstairs stories that feature alien plant creatures.

horror
Also in November, the Gemini large language model invented the "notionator" (a device to stimulate creative thought) as described in my blog post called "Birth of the Notionator". Also in that blog post is a discussion with the Claude large language model about science fiction as a literary genre and how it gets linked to horror stories. 

For the image shown to the left, I tried to get WOMBO Dream to generate a horror-tinged image depicting the birth of a Noema. Sadly, the alien creatures did not really end up with the appearance of plant-people. That might be poor Gyulya about a year after she discovers some alien larvae in her bed.

image source
 December. In December I published a blog post in which the Gemini and Claude LLMs helped me devise the long jargony title "Chronoendosymbiotic Telepathic Transfer Protocol" for a science fiction story about the Sedron Time Stream. Claude even wrote a song about chronoendosymbiosis that could be performed as part of an opera (see the image to the right).

image source
Also in December, I blogged about the milestone of reaching 1,000,000 pageviews for this blog.

In December, I started a new science fiction story called "D*" which describes an attempt by Tyhry to investigate the Jarnell Corporation and the type of interstellar spaceship propulsion technology that was used to spread Humanity through the galaxy in the Asimov Reality. Tyhry discovers that clones of herself and Marda existed in that Reality and their replicoid copies were used as the secret agents of Manny who could infiltrate human society and spread key genes for telepathy. "Silencing the Imperialist" has become the most frequently visited blog post of December 2025.

2024: Retro-SIHA award.
My Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens took me to Korea, but once again I opted for a retro-SIHA, giving the award to the old Star Trek episode, "The Corbomite Maneuver". 

image source
The "The Corbomite Maneuver" was inspiration for my new fan-fiction science fiction story "The Fesarians" which is set in the Ekcolir Reality. In "The Fesarians", I re-imagine the alien Balok as a bumpha, thus inserting Balok into my Exodemic Fictional Universe.

The most visited blog post for 2024 is Nymerya Coryn 🏆 which includes Part 1 of Vythoth the Chresmoscopist.

Related Reading: 2025 in review, 2023 in review

Next: the science fiction stories of Katherine MacLean.

Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers

Dec 20, 2024

Seasoning

Figure 1. reference image source
 While making illustrations for the science fiction story "D*", I wanted to make an image showing Tyna and Mylana on the planet Sadal Suud IV. Since we were approaching the solstice, I began wondering about the seasons on that imaginary exoplanet. Back in 2023 I was making a story about Tyhry and Marda and their visit to the Ekcolir Reality (made possible by the Reality Simulation System). As shown in the image to the right, I had Mr. Wombo generate an image that had some Fall season color in the trees.

Figure 2. Tyna and Mylana; Fall.
 Fall. During the past year, many new "version 3" (v3) styles have become available for use with WOMBO Dream. I used Figure 1 as a reference and now Mr. Wombo generated the new and improved image shown in Figure 2. For "D*", I imagine that Tyna is a copy of Tyhry and Mylana is a copy of Marda. Eventually, Tyna and Mylana realize that they are "secret agents" for Manny the bumpha. Tyna and Mylana do not really mind being used in this way because they are being used by Manny to spread useful genes that will help humans evolve into a telepathic variant.

During their young lives, Tyhry and Marda have gradually realized that they are tryp'At, a human variant that was crafted by Manny in the far future of the Asimov Reality.

Figure 3. Winter: Aymy in snow.
 Winter. Tyna was born on Earth, moved to Alphanor at a young age and then her family first visited Sadal Suud IV when Tyna was about six years old. Tyna grew up thinking of Mylana as her sister and as tryp'At replicoids, they were able to develop a fairly efficient means of sharing thoughts by means of technology-assisted telepathy. Tyna's mother, Aymy, grew up on Earth and was among the first humans to have a weak telepathic connection to her personal Grendel and to the Phari.

Figure 3 shows a depiction of Aymy in winter that was generated by Mr. Wombo. In my imagination, this wintry scene could be on Earth, at about the time when Aymy realized that she was pregnant (and carrying the embryo that would become Tyna). At that time, Aymy had moved to a floating city called Abin-284, but she would have made a trip home to visit her mother, Elyzabeth, in rural Pennsylvania upon learning that she was pregnant, possibly during a Winter holiday.

Figure 4. Spring flowers on Sadal Suud IV.
 Spring. Here in 2024, I had fun imagining plant-like aliens on the distant exoplanet Elemacha-z. On Sadal Suud IV, the Jarnell Corporation was able to keep their sedron mine secret through the entire space age, right up until Aymy and her family arrived on that world. One of the tricks used to prevent accidental discovery of the sedron mining facility on Sadal Suud IV was to surround it with alien life forms that made it difficult for people on foot to reach the mine and sedron processing station. Figure 4 is a rather fanciful depiction of Aymy and Vant on Sadal Suud IV during their search for the mysterious source of a substance they called D* in the atmosphere of that world. 

Figure 5. Summer-time Tyna.

 Summer. Eventually, Aymy and Vant learn that D* is created as a by-product of the isolation of the sedrons that make possible interstellar space travel. However, that awesome solution to the mystery of the source of D* is only made possible by the sleuthing of Tyna and Mylana. Eventually, after having discovered the existence of anti-gravity hierions in the substance D*, Tyna learns how to program the femtobot components of her replicoid body, which allows her to successfully infiltrate the sedron mine on Sadal Suud IV. For all her trouble, Tyna earns a visit from Manny the bumpha. Manny explains to Tyna that in the Asimov Reality, humans cannot be allowed to know what makes space travel possible. Manny erases Tyna's memories, but watching via the Reality Simulation System is Tyhry, who now can use knowledge of sedrons to complete her interstellar spaceship in the Ekcolir Reality.

The Discovery of D*
Given the ability of Tyna to telepathically and synapexically link her mind to the mind of her mother Aymy, it is not always clear to readers of "D*" exactly who is responsible for the discovery of the mysterious substance "D*". In a very real sense, the young Tyna does not really have a mind that is distinct from Aymy. Only with time does Tyna became more than an accessory information processing subsystem that Aymy can use to advance her mathematical analysis of hierions and sedrons.

Mylana data processing.
Tyna and Mylana do eventually come to understand that they were crafted and used as a tool by Manny to alter the flow of Time, speeding up the development of telepathic variants of the human species. By the wonders of temporal paradox, Tyna and Mylana became part of the galaxy-spanning breeding project that led to their own existence in the far future of the Asimov Reality. Due to the constraints of temporal paradox, even when they became aware of their special role in creating themselves, Tyna and Mylana could not do anything to alter their trajectory in Time. Not that they ever wanted to. Part of Manny's plan was providing Tyna and Mylana with such interesting and enjoyable lives that they never had a desire to alter anything about their existence.

Mylana and Tyna making friends
during a sex party sleepover.

I'm not yet certain about the method that Tyna and Mylana used to infiltrate the sedron mining and processing facility on Sadal Suud IV. Possibly Aymy's long-term contract with the Jarnell Corporation included perks such as enrolling Tyna in the same schools attended by the children of the workers at the secret spaceship fueling station on Sadal Suud IV. Tyna would not be inhibited from programming her femtobot components so as to enhance her physical beauty. 

Using some combination of her superb body, her telepathic abilities and infites, I suppose it was inevitable that Tyna would ultimately be able to penetrate the secret Jarnell Corporation operations on Sadal Suud IV. As illustrated in the image to the left, Tyna and Mylana could probably have fun along the way while simultaneously dealing with their irrepressible tryp'At libidos.

The tryp'At in the 20th century.

The image to the right is a whimsical depiction contact between an Earth woman and a tryp'At visitor to Earth. Previously, I've hinted that in the Final Reality there were some tryp'At agents on Earth during the 20th century. When Tyna and Mylana learn that their bodies are composed of femtobots, they begin experimenting with how to recover their original tryp'At physical features. In contrast to how Tyhry accomplishes that using medical nanites, Tyna and Mylana attain the ability to quite rapidly morph the structure of their bodies. I don't imagine that the tryp'At have green skin or green hair, but in the context of a story written by Ivory Fersoni, who never got to meet a tryp'At while she lived on Earth, why not use unusual pigmentation to emphasize the differences between normal Earth humans and the tryp'At? While spreading genes for telepathy into the human gene pool, why not leave the recipients of "close encounters" with memories of green alien visitors?

Tyhry and Tyna meet a Phari.

Operating out of her nanite research laboratory in the Ekcolir Reality, Tyhry spends several weeks studying her copy in the Asimov Reality: Tyna. Tyna has discovered that she has been assisted during her entire life by her personal Grendel. While living on Sadal Suud 4, a planet of the Phari network, Tyna has had occasional contacts with the Phari. The image shown to the left depicts a meeting between Tyna, Tyhry and a Phari. To make the meeting go more smoothly, the Phari adopts the physical form of a humanoid alien as commonly found in Earthly science fiction stories.

Tyhry routinely uses both clothing and hair nanites to modify her appearance. She's delighted to discover that the Phari has complete control over Tyhry's clothing nanites. The Phari seems to be fascinated by Tyhry's tryp'At anatomy, particularly her penis. By using tight-fitting shirts, Tyhry can usually hide her two lower breasts, but when she is sexually excited it becomes impossible to contain her erect penis inside its abdominal sheath.

Tyhry and the playful Phari.
The image shown to the right is a fanciful depiction of Tyhry meeting a Phari who wants to explore Tyhry's allzaurish. Tyhry is impressed by the Hi Tek™ vibrator that belongs to the Phari. I don't really expect a Phari to adopt a body for such as this, but when I asked Gemini to generate a humanoid alien, I got tentacles and no legs. The Gemini-generated head was rather hideous, so I had Mr. Wombo modify the original version to make a less scary appearance, one that might have a chance of enticing Tyhry into an alien sexplay session.

Anti-gravity alien.
The image to the left shows one of the aliens that was generated by Mr. Wombo, this one hovering over a snowy street. This image amused me, because an important technological issue in my science fiction story "D*" is the discovery negative mass hierions. Maybe this alien creature makes use of negative mass hierions as a way to avoid frozen tentacles on a cold day spent exploring Earth and trudging down icy streets.

floating habitats for humanity
At the start of "D*", it is mentioned that while pregnant with Tyna, Aymy lived inside Abin-284, a futuristic habitat which "floated above Philadelphia like a 30 megaton party balloon". The Jarnell Corporation has long had access to a type of negative mass hierion that makes it possible to construct highly mobile air cars and spaceships as well as floating cities.

fiction in the Final Reality

The image that is shown to the left is a whimsical depiction of the search for the source of D* that is in the atmosphere of Sadal Suud 4. It is difficult to predict exactly what Tyhry will report to Rylla and Eddy when she explains how she solved the interstellar spacecraft propulsion problem. Having systematically bent most of the ethical rules that Eddy developed for users of the Reality Simulation System, Tyhry is likely to provide her family with a largely fictitious version of the discovery of a sedron mine on Sadal Suud 4 in the Asimov Reality.

Othing House, Sadal Suud 4. Image by Mr. Wombo.
I've been trying to imagine exactly where Tyna and her family live when they are on Sadal Suud 4 (at a place I'll call "Othing House"). Sadal Suud 4 is an artificial planet, part of the Phari Network. The details of the history of Sadal Suud 4 are known only to the Phari, but it is a world that the pek never infected with zeptites. As such, there are some humans on Sadal Suud 4 who were never provided with a zeptite endosymbiont.

Patty Hawkyn
In my imagination, Aymy and Vart become entangled with some high officials of the Jarnell Corporation (Mr. and Mrs. Hawkyn) who lack zeptite endosymbionts. The Hawkyns are interested in Vart's efforts to identify the source of the mysterious D* that is in the atmosphere of Sadal Suud 4. Fearing exposure of the secret sedron mining facility and working on the theory that it is best to keep your enemies nearby, that "entanglement" includes Vart impregnating Mrs. Hawkyn (Patty), at the request of Mr. Hawkyn.

The Jarnell Corporation has a centuries-old human breeding and eugenics program. One of the goals of that effort is to enhance human capacity for understanding the theory of hierion physics and the engineering and application of hierion-based technologies. Recognizing that Aymy has a unique talent for mathematical thought, the Corporation intends to breed Aymy with physicists such as Vart and Mr. Hawkyn.

Gatehouse for the Hawkyn estate, Sadal Suud 4.
The image shown to the right was generated by Mr. Wombo as a depiction of the Hawkyn estate on Sadal Suud 4. With several generations of the Hawkyns living without zeptite endosymbionts, they have escaped from the usual suppression of scientific reasoning and technical thought that has been systematically imposed by the bumpha during the space age of the Asimov Reality. 

Like Aymy and Anyta, Patty is interested in mathematics. Like Vart, Mr. Hawkyn (his first name is Inyde) has training in physics, particularly hierion physics, a subject area that can only be researched by residents of Sadal Suud 4 where hierion-based sedron purification methods are used to produce the "fuel" that makes interstellar space travel possible.

Aymy and Patty
The image shown to the left is a depiction of Aymy and Patty during the time when they are both pregnant, Patty carrying Vart's son and Aymy carrying the son of Inyde's brother, Yzay. This is Aymy's fourth pregnancy, but only the second for Patty. Patty has a young daughter who was fathered by Yzay.

The home and research facility of Yzay.
Inyde is seemingly infertile due to a somatic mutation that arose early during his embryonic development, but his twin brother, Yzay, takes on the obligation of spreading the gene patterns that he shares with Inyde. 

Sadal Suud sedron works.

Tyna and Mylana grow up as friends of the children of the Hawkyns and other senior Jarnell Corporation officials who all live on Sadal Suud 4. Attending the same schools with children of the highest Corporation officials, Tyna and Mylana are eventually able to discover some of the Jarnell Corporation secrets, such as the existence and uses of hierion probes. Tyna makes use of a hierion probe to reveal the fact that her body is composed of hierions in the form of programmable femtobots. Once Tyna is able to alter her physical form by re-programming her femtobots, she learns how sedrons are mined, purified, and incorporated into interstellar spaceship engines as the "fuel" that makes it possible for humans to spread from planet to planet through the galaxy. Tyhry learns that sedron-based space travel technology from Tyna and takes it back to the Ekcolir Reality where it allows her to complete Sedrover.

Aymy in the physics laboratory.

For Aymy, Anyta and Vart, the technological mystery to be solved is why only Sadal Suud 4 has the unusual substance D* in its atmosphere. Both Anyta and Aymy become intrigued by the task of creating a theoretical model that can accommodate hadrons, hierions and sedrons in one grand unified description of all particle physics. At the core of Aymy's and Anyta's work is the fundamental question: why do some hierions have negative mass? With tools provided by the Hawkyns, Aymy and her young daughter Tyna are able to devise and carry out an experiment with a hierion probe that reveals a surprising truth: their bodies are not composed of biological cells, but rather hierion matter that has been shaped by femtobot programming so as to precisely mimic the human body form in precise detail.

Aymy's robot dream.
 Part 2 of "D*" described the first meeting between Anyta and Maz the robot. Aymy was able to meet both Vart and Anyta before her first encounter with Maz. Aymy was somewhat uncomfortable with a sexbot living in her home and the presence of the machine provoked disturbing dreams. The image shown to the left is a depiction of a dream in which Aymy imagined having been converted into a robot. Eventually, she did learn that she was an artificial life-form composed of femtobots: a replicoid.

Maz goes shopping.

After taking Anyta to see her academic advisor (see Part 2), Maz went shopping, not only for food but for some new body parts that she thought might please the three students who were now in her care. The image shown to the right is a depiction of Maz shopping for a new wig at the robot parts store soon after she met Vart and learned of his preference for women with blond hair. That day, in an attempt to prevent a penis shortage in her dorm suite and knowing that Aymy and Anyta would be pleased, Maz also purchased three new penis attachments which she began carefully reconstructing into precise functional replicas of Vart's penis.

Figure 6. Tyna on Sadal Suud 4.
In Part 3 of "D*", a replicoid copy of Anyta is taken into the Ekcolir Reality by Tyhry. Part 4 of "D*" is set some 4 years later when a copy of Tyna is plucked out of the Asimov Reality Simulation by Tyhry. Readers should be prepared for a surprise because the copy of Tyna that is brought into the Ekcolir Reality by Tyhry in Part 4 of the story is not the age of Tyna as shown in Figures 6 and 7.

Figure 7. Tyna visits Earth.
Having already tried to learn from Aymy, Anyta and Vart how they ended up moving to Sadal Suud 4, Tyhry must finally seek the answer to that question by making a telepathic connection to Tyna.

After solving the mystery of what makes it possible for the Jarnell Corporation's intersplit drive to move spaceships rapidly across vast interstellar distances, Manny the bumpha erased that information from Tyna's mind and sends Tyna on a new mission to Earth.

Figure 8. Tyna and Mylana.
In my imagination, Tyna and Mylana are sent from Sadal Suud to Earth (Figure 8) by Manny so that they can meet Kyrt Gersen and Alys Wroke who have for decades been trying to understand the mystery of zeptite endosymbionts. While Kyrt and Alys (see Figure 9) have been working at the problem from the perspective of people who can have more than one zeptite endosymbiont, Tyna and Mylana have known people on Sadal Suud who have no zeptite endosymbiont. Tyna and Mylana meet Jym and use a hierion probe to inactivate the Jyha Ryys artificial life-form in Jym's endosymbiont and they successfully accomplish a controlled zeptite endosymbiont "transplant" on Jym, providing him with an updated endosymbiont that is much less annoying than the Jyha Ryys life-form and which allows Jym to communicate with his personal Grendel.

Figure 9. Kyrt and Alys

I'm not yet sure how large of a role Grendels and Phari will ultimately play in "D*". Possibly, while Tyhry is inside the Asimov Reality Simulation, she will have a chance to telepathically link to some Grendels and Phari by way of a telepathic connection involving Tyna and Mylana. 

As hinted previously, Alys was apparently in contact with the Phari (and probably her own personal Grendel). It might only be when Tyhry, Tyna, Mylana, Kyrt and Alys all come together on Earth that Tyhry will be able to telepathically link to the Phari (Figure 10).

Figure 10. Meet the Phari.
Click image to enlarge.

In my imagination, within the Asimov Reality, the Phari are masters of the Hierion Domain and they can receive information from the future by capturing and processing T-waves. They are aware of how the Jarnell Corporation human eugenics and breeding project turns out in the far future. Ultimately, the telepathic tryp'At are created by forced evolution and then Manny the bumpha can't resist using Huaoshy time travel technology to send copies of some tryp'At (such as the original version of Tyhry) back into the past. However, there is one additional twist to Manny's scheme: Tyna is not biological, she is a replicoid copy of the biological original. 

Figure 11. In an alternate Reality.
The image to the right is a pulpish joke cover concerning the Jarnell Corporation human eugenics program as it might have existed in some alternate Reality besides the Asimov Reality.

non-fiction in the Asimov Reality

In the Asimov Reality, the goal of the galaxy-spanning human breeding project was the creation of telepathic humans who were inter-fertile with conventional humans. The upper administrators of the Jarnell Corporation (such as Patty and Sonya Hawkyn) might have believed that the Jarnell Corporation eugenics program was for some other purpose besides telepathy, but not the bulging muscles shown in Figure 11.

A hierion probe experiment.
When Tyna and Mylana obtain access to hierion probe technology, they begin a series of experiments aimed at trying to control their zeptite endosymbiont. They never realize that their brains actually contain two distinctly different nanoscopic endosymbionts. Their Phari endosymbiont is composed of heirions and a distributed network of femtobots that is sensitive to the modulating effects of their hierion probe. The operation of a zeptite endosymbiont cannot be directly effected by the hierion probe. The image shown to the right is a rather whimsical depiction of an experiment with a hierion probe.

In 2025: Part 4 of "D*".

Next: the 2024 Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens

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