Before I start, let me state that it is good to be the queen. Here I am on my throne in my fancy little dress, and my crown made out of a cheapy ring, Look good, don’t I. When I came from Ebay I was stark naked and had no identity at all, which is a sad state for a toy. That is the good thing about holders. They identify you. After a certain period of time residing in a drawer with a bunch of other Calico Critters, waiting for their identity.
I am now the queen. And I am writing this entry as if I were JZ, herself. These are her own thoughts. I know that because she talks to herself. And this, well, I found a lot of this actually written down, in a forgotten folder down deep in her file structure. It was a bit lame, so I’ve jazzed it up a bit.
Let’s talk about Telepathy.
Ok, random. But not if your holder just finished writing a novel about telepathy.
Let me make this clear. Telepathy is not a recommended subject for sci-fi, fantasy writers. It’s been done, its been overdone, and possible been done so long ago it’s in the sci-fi graveyard. (You know. Those books that have been dead for fifty years? Or two months, possibly?) But with the advent of self publishing everything has been overdone. You’d need numbers with exponents to count how many vampire/werewolf books there are out there. To say nothing about retelling of fairy tales.
Sooo… Let’s overdo something.
Let me tell you a bit about the universe I’ve been writing in. Yes, it has telepathy. No, it isn’t magic. It’s science. Well, almost science. Science fiction, anyway, which is where you suspend logic about certain aspects of the universe you’ve entered, just to be nice to the author. Come with me on a trip through a pseudo-scientific justification of my universe, remembering to leave your incredulity behind and carry a large satchel of indulgence, while I attempt to explain.
Imagine, if you will, that science has advanced to the point where computer memory storage exists as a cloud of particles within a cube. By applying appropriate electrical charges, computer engineers are able to coax the cloud to assemble itself into a grid, and each grid-pocket into a state of on or off. They can thereby make it store their mundane bits and dabs of computer data, and their lovely AI programs. Computer storage limits go poof. AI programs improve to the point that science can finally admit it’s impossible to make a truly intelligent machine.
Sigh.
But they can hook computers up to human brains. Stick an interface in the right area of the brain, and wow does that brain adapt to being able to communicate instantly, and view cat videos whenever the meeting gets boring.
Okay. So we’ve established brain-to-computer interface. What next? Well, what if those immensely large cloud memories could copy a brain’s activity? Store it off? Multiply it? Could you get a true AI out of it? A personality, as it were?
Not really. Even hooking a gazillion cloud memories together isn’t enough to convert the kind activity that occurs in the human brain into the kind of logic that computer programs use. Too many branches. Too many decision points that, for a computer, have to go either A or B. Humans, it appears, do not make A/B decisions. Humans multiply A times B, add in a little C, subtract some D, round the answer to the nearest hundredth, add an emotion or two and get something like a Conga dance line.
But then comes trik. Wonderful trik. The unobtainium of my universe, and the reason for so many problems.
Ah, come on. You’re adding another factor into the equation? You’re dragging red herrings through the narrative? I’ve only got so much disbelief I can hang onto, you know.
Sorry for putting words into your cloud memory, but bear with me. I promise it will make the sort of sense that you need to expect in this kind of exercize.
Trik is a substance that has been tortured through the hearts of succeeding stars (much like the stuff we’re made of, says Carl Sagan). It has the peculiar quality of vibrating between two or three dimensions of reality, when energy is applied. Actually, it vibrates between every dimension of reality, but that’s beyond the scope of scientists’ measurements, so they ignore it. The two realities they can identify, they posit, must lie just next to ours, one on each side. Right through the veil. So close you could almost touch them. But so different.
As far as we can tell, the universe on the right exists as random energy, with no particular form, The one on the left is somewhat variable. Both react to stimulus applied to the trik while it is in our universe, which is seldom, but often enough to make it look like it’s here all the time. It’s like: You know how atoms are mostly empty space? Neutrons and protons in the middle, and electrons all swirling around in a cloud? Yeah, nothing’s really solid, despite the evidence of our eyes and fingers. Everything around us is probably just waves of tiny, little bits of stuff, vibrating at different speeds.
Quantum. Gotta love it.
Back to the story: What if, thought scientists, we hook trik up to a cloud-memory interface module? Huh. Look at that. There’s no cloud-cube hanging off the end, but it’s registering buckets of memory registers. Big buckets. Wait. I think we’ve got a whole universe of memory registers here. Who’da thought?
Poof go the memory limits again.
The next thing to do is stuff trik into a brain interface. The Memory, as they come to call it (no one said they were original) finally has enough computing space to reflect and copy all of a brain’s thinking activity. Voila. True, intelligent, programmable personalities in the Memory. Later, they discovered that trik could affect things in our universe. You could poke at things from inside the Memory, and cause things to happen here. In fact, you could warp our universe, create bubbles in which the rules of physics were as fluid as truth from Washington DC. Wait, that sounds like faster-than-light travel. Artificial gravity. Weather manipulation.
Things quickly descended into an A/B condition. A: Humans got to look a little further into the galaxy. B: Hell on earth. Or on another planet, where a love-sick lothario with a trik interface wilted into a lily-like demise by setting the entire atmosphere on fire.
And the other B. If you’ve got a trik-based Memory interface in your head, and you are conversant enough with the memory, you can see other people’s patterns reflected up there. You can talk to them, call them up, prod them in the head and tell them it’s dinner time. And if you’re really mean, you can copy a snippet of your own Memory personality reflections over into their pattern, and change their mind. Temporarily, of course, since human minds aren’t all that programmable from the Memory. They could be, though. They knew enough about human genetics to make people who would be programmable. They wouldn’t, of course. That would be totally unethical. Heh heh.
Which lead to the seeder expedition. And that’s the end of this story.
And you’re still here.
Okay. Queen here. There’s a tidy little explanation of what the seeders are, and how they created a population of programmable humans. It’s at the beginning of my holder’s novel Valencia. And, if you care to read past chapter 1, you’ll see what being programmable does to a population. Or a town. Or a person.
Valencia will be available on Kindle for about three bucks, which is not bad for a book that took her literally years to produce. To say it languished is an understatement. It wouldn’t be out there at all except me and my typing crew got it shipshape and ready to release. And if she keeps sleeping soundly at night, there’ll be more stories in this universe to come.
Right now, I’m arranging to have this book available free to early readers, so watch for promotions!
Enjoy.