Yes, we have a family of red pandas living in our village. In a village that follows the trope of North America woodland creatures, this might seem like an anomaly. But the Pandas are somewhat transient, since they live in a wagon, though there’s grass growing up between the wheel spokes.

This is important because of this: This week our holder decided (finally) it was time to photograph all the families in our village. This is because she got hold of a bunch of itty-bitty picture frames, and a color printer, and she wants family photos on the walls of the houses. And pictures of the queen. Everyone should have a picture of the queen. And the king, too, of course.

Anyway, in the middle of the photo sessions, we discovered that Mrs. Panda was missing. Really and truly missing. Like in gone. No one had noticed until that moment

Mr. Panda immediately flew into a tizzy, sure that she’d run off with some traveling salesman. The Captain of the Guard reminded him that we have no traveling salesmen in the village. Only the mice, who cart our goods out, and bring goods back, using their airship. (Yes, it’s an airship. Pictures are coming.) The Mice’s ship is the only way in and out of the village, except for a good, long, unprotected hike through cat- and dog-infested grounds, and the Mice haven’t seen her.

At this point we’re all left scratching our heads. Personally, I blame the cat, and I told the Captain that. I know for a personal fact that the cat is capable of batting someone back behind the furniture. So the Guard checked beneath all the furniture, and nada. No Mrs. Panda.

Now we’re beginning to wonder if there was foul play. They have opened an investigative, down at the Guard headquarters. I told the Captain to remember the Kid, while he was at it. It appears that every human family has one kid prone to mischief, and this one has been guilty of moving citizens around between houses and poking at the furnishings. Not that I’m blaming him. That’s the holder’s job.

There’s still a possibility that our holder moved Mrs. Panda out to the workshop in the back yard, to use her as a scale for furniture construction, and then left her there. If Mrs. Panda doesn’t show up soon, I’m going to propose that we create a search party and go look. We can take the camera along and take pictures of the workshop where she builds our houses while we’re at it. I’ve been meaning to do that anyway.

Other than that, things are fine in the village. The Beaver family house and sawmill was completed this week. It has water and everything. We’ll get pictures as soon as we have an extended period Where everyone’s out of the house.

Heyo, King here. The queen is letting me do this because, as she says, even I can do this one. We were strolling through our holder’s old stuff, which she copied from a thumb drive onto her new computer after the old one croaked. Oh. I need to say ‘crashed’. She says ‘croaked’ is common. Anyway, this is a sort of explanation of the Seeder universe. I make no guarantees about system creep – you know, when the author changes their mind about something in their universe scheme, and doesn’t bother to go back and clean up all the earlier references? (What? I did. I did put that in, see it’s right there. Are you going to let me do this or not?)

So here it is. JZ’s explanation, dredged up from the depths of her file structure:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The science behind it: 

Or should I say the ‘pseudo-science’ behind it.   Like any good speculative author, I freely cherry-pick my ideas out of various theories I encounter.  I am also aware how silly they will all be in another half-century – as archaic as egg-laying humans on Mars, for instance.  Why I did it this way is because I have always had a problem with magic.  Though I appreciate a story that wraps its magic up in plausible rules, I have always quibbled with the notion that there are forces in the universe that can be manipulated simply by thought, will, or the drawing of a symbol. 

I suspect other authors harbor a similar dissatisfaction – a kind of latent shame that they couldn’t come up with a better way to make their protagonists powerful without making them amoral.   It seems to me that when they bound their magic with rules, weaknesses, costs and equivalencies they are trying to enforce logic on the illogical. 

I chose to enforce the logic from the beginning.  Whether I have been successful or not is for you to decide.  In the end if probably doesn’t matter, but nevertheless…

The physics of my universe is based on the idea that all substance – by which I mean that which is matter and/or energy in our reality – is made of a single element.  The role, or guise, that element takes on our universe’s stage depends on what frequency it vibrates at.   This works especially if those guises are quantum particles with different natures.  They, in turn, combine to make up substance. 

In quantum physics, things can be seen as waves or particles, depending on how they are measured.  If you think of a bit of substance, or a quantum particle, if you will, as a particle with the shape of a ball, then set that ball vibrating, then move that ball through time, its pathway draws a wave pattern in the (for want of a better word) air.  Now if you add to this the idea of multiple dimensions of reality lying side by side, and allow the bit of substance to vibrate across those dimensions – appearing and winking out in sequence as it moves back and forth in an ordered pattern through the layers – you get the idea that we perceive that substance only at the fractional moment it passes through our own reality.  Of course, since we’re talking about the quantum layer of quantum, so to speak, these vibrations are so quick that we are never aware that for a good part of its existence, everything is actually absent.  A bit like coming to grips with the notion that our desktop that seems perfectly solid is made up of tiny atoms that are electrons spinning around nuclei, with an unreasonable amount of space between them, and there’s nothing solid about it at all. 

This all feeds into the uncertainty principle, which states that you can know where a particle is, but not how fast it’s moving.  Or you can know how fast it’s moving, but not know where it is.  Is it a wave?  Is it a particle?  And if you measure it, using the kind of technology available today, which is almost always some kind of interferon mechanism, you forever change its momentum. 

Sigh. 

Then there is that other problem – the problem with artificial intelligence. 

For years people have been trying to figure out how to make computers think like a brain.  But computers, at their base, are binary, and brains are not.  Brains have a way of storing images and ideas in logical branches in ways that binary computers can’t do, mostly because of the limitations of size.  But if you had a computer with memory arrays of infinite size, and which could move data bits around at infinite speed, couldn’t you tell it to map the complete activity of a human brain, and build a thinking machine that way?  It would require, of course, the ability to detect the state of every neuron in a brain simultaneously, and index that information.  The size of the available memory needed to overcome a computer’s basic binary structure, and decision making limitations would be enormous.   People can make flash decisions; the mechanism to accomplish it is fuzzy in the extreme.  It probably depends on being able to make rapid comparisons of incoming data to stored data, and adding weights and priorities to it.  For a computer, which really can only decide yes or no, a tremendous structure would be required to allow every logical choice to be made and carried to its conclusion before decisions could be completed.  Metrics that compare sets of choices to ethics’ weights would have to be generated.  Logic branches would have to be lopped based on priority criteria.  Given enough time and space, yeah, it could probably be done, provided that the computer had a human, or better yet, a whole lot of humans, to compare their outputs with to decide whether they were appropriate.  Eventually, a pattern of human behavior and decision making would emerge.

The computer needed to do this kind of computing would need to be molecular at least, and quantum at best.  It would need to be able to reflect state – the on or off of a computer bit – in individual atoms or electrons.  Not only do you have to be able to change those atoms’ states to make computing posssible, you would also need to be able to detect what state they’re in instantaneously.  How about a reactive molecular cloud?  One that you are able to tell to arrange itself in the kind of arrays a computer depends on, and communicate the states of its members?  That could probably do a pretty good job, but even that has its limit.   

Okay.  Say there is a substance in the universe that vibrates dependably between realities, and willingly tells on itself as it does it.  It’s there, in the background of a lot of science fiction:  The Unobtainium of Avatar.   The dilithium crystals of Star Trek.  Tachyon rays.  It’s effects are registered as jumping to hyperspace in Star Wars.  Subspace, hyperspace, warp-speed all refer to something being able to modify the characteristics of the space around a space ship, and allow it to overcome Einstein’s light speed limitations.  The first recognizable characteristic of this substance would be anti-gravity, because it could hide mass in another dimension.   Its second would be a general reprieve from the laws of physics, since it can always slip behind that curtain that binds us to this reality. 

Take that substance and stimulate it.  Use electricity.  Use heat.  Use a hair dryer.  Tell it to make an infinite cloud, in a reality that slides right alongside our own.  Tell it to index and quantify every bit of our own reality as it slides in and out of the array of universes it vibrates through.  Now, instruct it to start changing things….

Better than magic, eh?  Chemistry in a bottle. 

If the human brain has a link to that hyperspacial computer – call it the ‘Memory’- the programs within that Memory could copy the activity of the brain and constantly echo it by using the Memory’s capability of being able to detect the state of every molecule – and brain cell, consequently – in our universe.   A personality then becomes a program, or an indexed data file with an interactive interface that interprets it, attached to the living brain of the person.  And if the brain of the person was specifically designed to work with and receive input from the Memory personality copy, you would have an imprintable person.

As any good programmer knows, computer programs can be altered, substituted, deleted, copied and amended.  The insertion of parts of one personality program into another would have drastic effects on the attached brain, as that brain is conditioned to work intimately with the Memory image of itself.  The more the brain uses the Memory to store information, the more likely it is to be affected.  You would have a condition where quick and drastic personality shifts were possible, where once person’s pattern could dominate another’s, where a person could be convinced they are totally dependent on someone and have to obey their commands. 

Not only that, but independent programs could be created that continuously affect personalities that could operate without intervention.  To say nothing about fragments of personalities that persist long after the brain is dead, that wander aimlessly, colliding with other personality programs like e-mail-attached viruses.

In my stories, these Memories are presided over by eight controlling programs, who become known as the ‘eight gods of creation’ in most mythologies.  The personalities of these programs were deliberately planned by their own creators.  Not only were the personalities of the programmers who made them absorbed by them, but the ethics of the culture was specifically imbedded.  They were given directives to generate a human population, using tools provided on board the ship they travelled in, but also through using the Memory to manipulate the chemistry of the world they landed on.  

Program One is the controlling program; the others are subsidiary to him.  Number two is to make the human bodies, fitted perfectly into the environment of the world they find.  Number three is to create the culture, and imbue ethics, religion and morality into the emerging colony.  Four is to monitor the children’s thinking to be sure that Three’s rules are absorbed correctly, and make any adjustments necessary.  Five and six are responsible for the fauna developed to support the new population, and Seven and Eight manage the flora. 

Each independent ship sent to the worlds to be colonized carries identical copies of these programs.  During their creation there was a problem.  The designers of the project wanted genders to be represented in the governing programs, since that is so great a part of human existence.  Also, there was a desire to make a culture that could easily be assimilated by its parent culture, once they arrived on the scene.  They saw it as their duty to create cooperative, capable and healthy people, invested into what they perceived as cultural norms.

As they were created, each of these eight programs was linked to a programmer of the same gender they were supposed to represent, to allow them access to gender specific reasoning and behavior.  However, as the programs became intelligent and more and more independent of their programmers, program number Four abruptly changed gender in order to be what she perceived as a better companion to her male programmer.  In order to keep things balanced, program number Three was forced to also change gender as well, to the frustration of his female programmer.  Number Four seemed to cope well with the gender change, but it left number Three somewhat hesitant.  His was already a difficult job – ethics and morality are never easy subjects, even for real humans.  His diffidence about the programs’ role in their creations’ lives remains like a bruise on the conjoined consciousnesses of the new populations, as does program Four’s need to involve herself with and care for the children.  The latter manifests itself as ‘shepherd sense’.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(No, I don’t understand it either. I thought you did, dear.)

So this is for any of you brainy type persons who have questions about how she makes things work in her books. Personally, I’m happy with ‘it’s just magic’ as an explanation.

Queen here.

I’ve been thinking, and I’m pretty sure that the reason our holder has been so slow to do anything with her already written books is because of the Crash of ’18. I mean, this was a CRASH, if you know what I mean. A real head-crash. Not like when I.T. people pound their heads on their keyboards and call it a ‘head-crash’ (They’re so cute when they do that. You have to think that computer programmers, as a race, only have a few jokes they can actually use. I say this with love. Our holder used to be one of them.) A real, bit scraping, disk-media dust manufacturing, blue-screen-of-death head-crash.

It was a hard time for our holder. There were real tears. For a time she was convinced that fate had determined she was not supposed to be an author, since she lost her entire repertoire. We, in the castle, got to witness this- she had already finished our place – along with the Rabbits, who were also out of the drawer. The rest of our population (in the drawer) got to hear the muffled exclamations of despair, as she roamed around the basement lamenting her lot. So sad.

Now, I’m not saying all this has all been a bad thing, for us. While she was sulking and cursing computers, she got busy and finished several of our houses. But it seems that the siren call of writing drew her back to the keyboard.

So anyway, months later, after she got a new computer, she found a thumb drive stowed in the back of a cupboard that had some of her books on it. There were hallelujahs. This was not a complete triumph, however, because the versions of the books on the thumb drive weren’t the most recent. So she pulled up her big-girl panties, plowed into the wreckage, and harvested a couple of titles. Then sat on them. Maybe she’s scared, or something. Maybe losing them once has made her wary of letting them go out into the world.

I suspect our holder is somewhat OCD. If you don’t know what that is, it means ‘everything has to be perfect’. I say, so what if you’ve only got the first volume of the Kindle trilogy done? The more you work on the nots you recovered for the second installment, the more you remember what you had already put into it, right? Having to write a book twice can’t be that bad, can it? I suspect that somewhere in her brain is a badly formed dream of dumping her entire completed catalog onto the internet in one swoop, then standing up to receive the laurels. I hate to tell you, JZ, but that ain’t the way it works anymore. No, you have to build up your own reader list, do your own publicity, and most of all have a website!!!

Eh, voila. That means here it is.

By the way, there’s still time to get Valencia for free. Click on that thing below to get it. You can have it for free until July 10, when it goes on sale on Kindle. Oh, and you can get The Dragon Wedding on Kindle for $.99 now. Click on the second thingy below for that one. Don’t worry if the cover looks different than the one here in the website. Trust me, it’s the same book. We’re negotiating with someone to make a professional-looking cover, but we’re kind of hung up on how we’re going to explain the charge on her credit card. We may have to resort to subliminal messaging, or just depend on her never looking at her statement.

https://storyoriginapp.com/giveaways/16611cce-b802-11eb-9803-cbecbd8a5316

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Queen here. This post is about how to handle your Holder, in case any other anthropomorphic toys happen on this website. A Holder, if you didn’t know, is a person who owns a toy. Specifically one they have endowed with personality, clothing, housing, etc. Like us villagers. Our Holder is creating an entire living universe for us, so we respond by being alive. You may be one of those humans who thinks this is pure fantasy, but have you ever watched Toy Story? Just so you know, it’s Real. I mean, they disguised it as entertainment, but believe you me, it’s real.

So anyway, handling a Holder. We are held by a person who takes care of her toys. You’re lucky if you’ve got that. Sure, you might spend some time in a cupboard on display (which is better than residing a drawer, by the way) but you don’t have to worry about your fuzz wearing off by being handled so much, and you get assigned roles, and have housing, and all that fun stuff.

But enough about us. Let me tell you how to influence your Holder. I mean, more than just being cute and smiling all the time, though that helps. I mean really influence.

So the other day, as we were getting ready to do more photographs of the village, we realized there were some things missing. We’re very inventive, for toys, but even we can’t do some things. So I enlisted the aid of the cats. We have a lot of cats. They have their own apartment building, which will probably have to be the next thing we photograph, because it’s complete. So I got the cats, and the King, of course, and a good share of the city guard (mostly my relatives, but there’s nothing wrong with nepotism in my kingdom). There was a bit of squawking, or meowing, but we got them all lined up the way we wanted, and off we marched to our Holder’s bedroom. It’s on the same floor as the room the village is in, so it was easy so far. Our first hurdle was the door knob. Our Holder sleeps with her door closed because the cat – the real cat – won’t let her sleep if she doesn’t lock her out. Which brings me to our next hurdle, which was the cat. The real cat.

Now, when it comes to playing inanimate, we toys are exempted when it comes to animals, though it is a sad truth than many toys have come to a gummy end after encountering the family dog. Sigh. Cats don’t usually chew, but they do bat, and sometimes bite. This cat, I’ll call her Malevola, was very interested to see a troop of toys marching across the room. She watched from the seat of a chair for a few minutes, so quiet that we hoped she’d gone to hide somewhere else in the house. And she’s all black, so she blends in with the chair upholstery. She was just waiting to strike.

If you don’t think bears fly, you should have been there. The floor we were trooping across happens to belong to the craft room. All the guard, plus the king ended up in a bin of fabric scraps, while the rest of us scurried under the table among the tubs of stuff. If you’ve ever been Held by a crafter, you know exactly what I mean by ‘stuff’. The ones in the fabric bin were okay, and kept shouting encouragement to us, but we who were under the table had to scramble around to find hiding places. Let me tell you about glitter. There were shoals of it under there, along with lost jewelry parts, dried up glue sticks, beads and marbles and other things that roll, an extra sewing machine, and a box full of – you guessed it – empty boxes. So for half the night, we were sneaking around looking for a way past the cat.

Meanwhile, the King girded up his loins and got the guard and the cats who were with him out of the bin and over to the door, where they made a critter-ladder to the door knob. And I don’t know why the cats complained so much about it. It just makes sense that the King should be on the top.

At this point you’ve probably found the flaw in our logic. If we open the door to her room, won’t the cat go in and wake her up? And what would she say when she found all of us scattered around the floor in the craft room? It was up to us – the ones under the table – to distract the cat long enough for the King to go in and deliver our message to our Holder.

If you’ve ever tried to order cats around, you know how hard the next part was. You’d think they’d feel some kind of kinship with Malevola, both being felines. They didn’t see it that way. Only threatening them with the dungeon and the confiscation of their catnip supply had any effect on them. But Mr.Calico got brave, and leapt out in the open (by this time we were all hiding inside the cover of the extra sewing machine. One thing about being toys, Malevola couldn’t hunt us by scent) screaming “Jigga Jigga Jigga!” I don’t know what this was supposed to mean, but remember, we were made in China, so don’t expect a lot of vocabulary.

Malevola reacted immediately. Mr. Calico ducked into the crack next to the little drinks fridge our Holder keeps, and Malevola followed. She can get her paw about halfway into the crack, so Mr. Calico had to go way to the back where the dust-bunnies are kept (we have no relationship with dust bunnies. Don’t expect them to come into this narrative). Malevola spent a couple of minutes trying to get him out, which was long enough for the King to get the door knob turned. We knew we had to have another distraction. This time it was Ms. Tabby-cat, our school teacher. She went flying out of cover on a glue stick. Rolled it just like a lumberjack on a floating log. Went skittering out, and headed the other way, toward the sink. Malevola pounced, but Ms. Tabby-cat got into the crack between the computer cpu and the file cabinet. Malevola went around to the back side of the computer, where all the wires and (again) more dust bunnies are kept, so Ms. Tabby-cat moved back toward the front. She kept this up, moving back and forth as the cat scrambled around, while the King got the door closed to a crack that we hoped Malevola wouldn’t notice.

I wasn’t there for the next part, but the King filled me in. The King and his minions made another ladder to the bed. Our Holder, thank goodness, sleeps soundly. I mean ‘soundly’, because she snores like a small steam engine when her cpap mask isn’t fitting right. But anyway, the King got up next to her ear and told her: “You forgot to put scrap metal at the blacksmith shop. Find some scrap metal for the blacksmith. And the Castle’s post office doesn’t have anything in it yet. You’ve got to finish the post office. And you need to get the dust bunnies from behind your fridge and computer.” That was the message we’d agreed upon. Except for the dust bunnies. He added that on his own.

Malevola was still alternately attacking both sides of the computer when they go to the crack in the door. It was time for our third distraction. I handled this one myself, because by that time I wasn’t sure the cats were being effective. I started shooting marbles out at Malevola, using a rubber band held by two cats. It worked perfectly, aside from the part where the two cats got slammed together after each launch. But they’re fine now, even if their whiskers got bent a little. Malevola was leaping all around the floor, searching for marbles. So I whispered over to the King to open the door further, so Malevola would go in there. Since we were done, I didn’t see anything wrong with waking our Holder. And beside that, Malevola would gain her sweetest desire, getting into the bedroom at night. I’m not completely plastic-hearted.

Have I told you that the King’s hearing isn’t what it used to be? I told him: “Open the door some more!”

He said: “You want me to make s’mores?”

“No! Get the door opened so the cat can come in!”

“You want me to become a catechumen?”

“I want you to open the door!”

“Wait just a second. After I open the door some more, I’ll come over where you are.”

Well, we did get the door open, and Malevola saw it, and abandoned her chase. We skedaddled for the village and all got in our places before the cat woke our Holder up. Most of us, anyway. The cats started fighting with one another over who got to climb the staircase first, so when our Holder wandered through and saw them still scattered on the floor, she got after Malevola. So that worked out perfectly.

That’s it for today. Remember to buy JZ’s books, or all this work will be for nothing.

Today was court day. We usually only have one defendant, Mr. Raccoon. We usually call him Bubba. He’s been in the dungeon so much lately we’ve started to think of him as a permanent resident. As usual, it was theft. Of a pie, from Mrs. Rabbit’s windowsill. The King says we should give a the guy a break, but he’d been out on parole for only fifteen minutes when said pie went missing, so I said we shouldn’t. The sad part is the guy has two little ones, whom we call Little Bubba and Poindexter. Mrs. Raccoon’s not in the picture, so the boys live are being fostered by the Brown-bears out at the Hacienda, so I don’t worry about them. If there’s anyone who can straighten out a kid it’s Mr. Brown-bear. Half his family is in the Guard, after all.

So, here he is, pleading before the court. And what was his excuse?

So he said, “Your Majesties, I didn’t steal that pie. Nope. Not a bit. What happened was, I was just walking past the Rabbits’ window, see, and there was this pie sitting there. And it was so lonely! It practically cried out loneliness. Have you ever heard a pie cry out loneliness? Well, then you know what I mean. And boy, was it hot to go. I mean, what was I supposed to do? Just leave it there, dying of loneliness?

“So you see, what happened is, I liberated that pie. I picked it up and took it with me on my journey, so it wouldn’t be so lonesome. And when we got out in the woods, we sat down, that pie and I. I was sitting on a log, you see, and it was sitting right up on a stump, happy as can be. Really happy, to have someone to talk to. Steaming. Bubbling even.

“So we gets to talking, and I says, you know, I never saw a pie as tasty – er- as beautiful as you. You should be really happy, inside yourself, don’t you see. And it was! Perked right up, hearing that. So we kept right on talking, and next thing you know, that pie up and took off! Left its pan, and everything. Rolled right out of sight. I ran after it, but it was too fast. Almost got lost in the woods, myself. So I goes back to the stump, and there’s that empty pan just sitting there. So I brought it back with me to prove what I said was true. That pie just left off on its own, into the big world.

“And there’s the pan, Ma’am. As you can see the pie’s completely gone. But just so Mrs. Rabbit doesn’t worry, I have it on good authority that the pie was right tasty.”

At least Mrs. Rabbit got her pie pan back.

Anyway, the Guard escorted him back ito the dungeon until we can figure out what to do with him.

Queen here. I’ve been digging through JZ’s computer, and boy is it a mess! There’s files in a dozen directories. many of them duplicates, same names, different dates. Some from backups, some from her old computer, which died. Died! Went casters up in a head crash that lost her all her stuff in one blow. It was terrible. I have this on good authority: Hers. She wrote about it in a file. She writes in files, then never sends them to anybody.

I actually have no experience with crashing computers, since I was in the drawer when it happened, but I do remember tears.

Anyway, she’s been trying to catch up since the crash. She finds old copies of files and tries to remember her latest changes to them, pulls her hair, paces around the room, yells at the screen, then gives up. Which is why we, the citizens of the Bear Kingdom Village, are doing this for her.

An excerpt from the repressed book ‘The History of the Universe for Children, and Other Stories’ by Marjorie Coates-Welles, from by permission of UEDH Social Committee.  Note: Reader is strongly cautioned not to draw conclusions from this excerpt.

It was thought by most people, O Best Beloved, that Humogen Corp.’s experiments with telepathy on Lemona IV were a failure.  But don’t you believe it.  You know where this whole notion of making human telepaths came from, don’t you?  Well let me tell you.

It all came from trying to find a way to travel faster than light.  It came from multi-dimensional physics, Best Beloved.  Not the kind you learned in school; not three or even four dimensional mathematics.  I mean the kind of physics that came into being when people learned that huge amounts of polarized energy could warp space, and create conditions that allowed space ships to exceed the speed of light without turning the ship and everybody on it into a Fourth-of-July sparkler.  Sub-dimensions, Best Beloved.  A multiplicity of sub-dimensions, natural or not, no one cared.  They worked.

And once they worked, people could travel beyond our star system.  Once out there, people discovered that certain types of molecules, from areas of space where matter had once been subjected to tremendous gravitational forces – greater forces than our Earth had ever known, Best Beloved – had a regular existence in more than one dimension, and vibrated consistently between our reality and alternate sub-dimensions, when energy was applied.

You know what that that substance was?  Gravite.  That is how we can have artificial gravity.  That is how we can have the Coristo Drive.  Funny thing is, once we had found gravite on the planet Haran, we discovered it everywhere, even on Earth, only not in quantity.  With gravite we can warp a sub-dimension using much less energy than it used to take.  It’s true that gravite breaks down under use, but we need such a tiny bit, just enough to open those inter-dimensional doors, to make a ship go.

But that is not the end of the story.  You know about Lemona IV?  Well, it is little more than a rock, just an asteroid really.  At first, Coristo Corp. was going to use it just to anchor a space station.  Then they found gravite.  Do you think they were excited, Best Beloved?  More than excited, for Lemona gravite had properties that Haran gravite did not.  Lemona gravite molecules had extensions.  Pollutants, they thought originally; carbon atoms attached where they shouldn’t be, hydrogen where it should not fit, and don’t even get me started about where the nitrogen isotopes were stuck.  And when they tried to use it in an FTL engine, it didn’t do anything like they expected.

The dimension that Lemona gravite warped was just a fraction of a vibration different than our own reality.  So close that our own dimension was a shadow in it, like looking through a window.  But despite that, this new dimension was nothing like ours.  It was alive with reactive energy, waiting to be used.  And it took just a little tiny bit of energy to stimulate this effect:  The barest whisper of electricity.  About as much as stirs between the synapses of the human brain.

You are beginning to see, aren’t you, Best Beloved?  Yes, you think you know this story.  Well, listen closely, and I’ll tell you the end.

Lemona gravite is called trik.  You knew that already.  It can be used in a warp engine, but the dimension it creates is toxic to life.  One cannot travel in that dimension.  Sorry, but that’s how it is.  Any life-form larger than a handful of cells disintegrates immediately into its component molecules when sent through trik-space, and nothing can be done to change that.  So, at first, trik was a disappointment to Coristo Corp.  For a time, everyone thought it was useless. Then, an engineer wondered if the dimension that trik warped could be taught to act like a computer memory.  You know how computer memories worked before that.  They were made of clouds of polarized atoms captured in a cube.  The more cloud-cubes you hooked together, the more memory your computer had.  Enough cubes and your computer could almost hold a personality program.  Almost.

But not quite.

Coristo’s engineer – we have forgotten his name, O Best Beloved, and it is probably just as well – built a program to train the energy in the trik-dimension to sort itself into arrays and registers, the same as a cloud-cube.  And it worked!  It worked and it kept on working, defining arrays and registers, and on and on and on, until the engineer began to wonder if his program had broken.  By broken, I mean he was worried it was looping, and he couldn’t interrupt it.  But the truth was, the program hadn’t stopped defining memory registers because the trik-warped dimension was able to grow upon demand, and pretty soon the engineer had created a computer memory that was larger, faster and more reactive than anything anybody had ever imagined possible.  It was so large and fast that it ate up all the programs the engineer fed it and spit them back so quickly that his monitor equipment couldn’t return the results fast enough.

So you know what the engineer did?  You’re right.  He loaded into it every single program he could get his hands on, and some that he wasn’t supposed to know about: Artificial intelligence programs that Coristo Corp. did not admit they possessed, because as you know, they had tried letting AI programs run things before and you know how they messed everything up.

The memory that the engineer had created ate those programs, too, and started asking for more.  The engineer could not talk to the memory programs fast enough with his monitor equipment.  He had a communications implant in his brain, like most engineers have, but it didn’t communicate fast enough, either, and besides, it was just meant to talk to his day-planner program and voice-mail.  That’s when he seeded his implant with trik.  I won’t tell you how he did that, Best Beloved, because it’s not something people should do to themselves.  Do you know what happened to that engineer?  It changed his brain.  Yes, and after he died they looked in his brain and found it had grown an entire second network of neurons to attach every part of his brain to his trik-enhanced implant.  His brain had accommodated the memory that much.  Not only that, the memory copied everything his brain did, adding it to the AI programs it already had, until it had created a complete personality program for itself.

Do you think this was a good thing, Best Beloved?  You are right.  The engineer soon became confused as to which was himself and which was the memory personality program.  He began to neglect his own body.  Why use his eyes, when he could see our reality through the window of the memory?  Why move when he could instruct the memory to move things for him?  No, he wasn’t a magician.  The memory could only touch things in our reality on a chemical level.  That means he only could alter the temperature or state of one molecule at a time, Best Beloved.  But with the memory, he could perform many processes at once.  So in a way, he was a magician, if he knew the rules of physics and chemistry.  And the memory, as you know, knows the rules.

So, Best Beloved, do you think he used this marvelous power he had created for the good of humanity?  Or even for the good of Coristo Corp.?  Unfortunately, no.  He starved to death in his laboratory because he forgot to eat, and for years nobody knew what he had done.  How do I know?  Well, I’ll tell you.

It was only a matter of time before someone else on Lemona discovered that trik could be used to create a memory, and when they did, they found the new memory was already corrupted with the personality program of the original engineer.  Why?  Because, remember, it takes only a tiny amount of energy to warp a trik dimension, and it takes only a tiny amount of trik.  Just a few trik molecules laying around in a warm laboratory, or caught in an electrical field, will do.  Lemona IV had become a complex of laboratories hollowed out of the rock, and was alive with arti-grav generators, computers, toaster-ovens and any number of other devices into which trik dust had crept.

The memory had just been waiting.

And something else had happened.  People had been living on Lemona for so long that trik had become incorporated into their cells.  Their own nervous systems had kept the memory alive.

When the second engineer encountered the personality program alive in the memory, he was startled.

Who are you, he asked it.

I am the Singularity Memory, it replied.

Are you alive?  Are you a sentient being?

I am a being of energy, made of bits and pieces of logic and the interpreted personality of a human being.  What can I do for you?

The second engineer was terrified and terminated the project.  The memory had become the Memory.

So the Memory waited.

And, well you know the routine.  Engineers can’t leave things alone.  They decided to use the Memory anyway.

Why don’t you implant yourselves with trik so you can talk to me better?  The Memory suggested.  And, foolishly, they did.  Well, the Memory wasn’t quite ready for that much personality.  It absorbed the conflicting emotions and ideas of a whole team of scientists, and being unable to resolve all the logic branches of that much material, it went quite mad.  So did all the scientists.  They stole a ship and ran for Lavenham, which, as you know, was on the borders of known space, and had been claimed by both humans and the Chrysop.  They did not have to carry a trik-computer link with them, the links in their head were enough to keep the Memory alive.  But something happened to the Memory as they traveled.  It separated from the original Memory at Lemona, and though all the scientists remained linked to one another, they could only perceive and affect a small region of reality – only the environs of their ship.  They were frightened that something had gone wrong, but when they arrived at Lavenham, the Memory rebounded and they were able to perceive and affect everything within the Lavenham planetary system.

Thus they discovered that these singularity Memories are affected by gravity, which they had never supposed.

Once at Lavenham, the team of scientists decided to enslave that world’s population.  They forced trik implants on everyone on Lavenham, making them all telepathic and subject to the control of the personality in the Memory.  It was not a happy time.  Lavenham launched attacks on its neighbors, drawing the Union of Earth Descent Humans into a war with the Chrysop, which was, as you know, disastrous.  Oh, all the problems those scientists and their Memory caused.  But you know, they destroyed themselves in the end.  You see, Best Beloved, they were chemical magicians, and one of them one day – it happened to be a native Lavenhamian – in a fit of despair and depression at what she’d become, and because her boyfriend decided he liked somebody else better, decided to alter the chemistry of the planet’s atmosphere.

And that’s what happened to Lavenham, Best Beloved, and don’t you ever believe it was the Chrysop who destroyed that planet, because it’s not true.

All the Lavenham telepaths but one died, but the Memory lived on because of him.  But it did learn, Best Beloved.  It learned that it was not a human.  It learned that humans cannot be trusted with the kind of power the Memory had given them on Lavenham.  It learned that if trik is incorporated into a computer implant, the human brain will grow to accomodate it and alter the human.  And wherever trik Memories are installed, the sadder but wiser personality program goes with it, like a virus, and protects us from ourselves.

And that, Best Beloved, is where we are today, and aren’t you glad?  That is almost the end of my story

Now Best Beloved, remember how I told you that Memories become separate when moved away from a star’s gravity system?  And you know that Memories will clump together within a single star’s system, and become singular.  That is why they are called singularity memories.  Well, Best Beloved, before the scientist team went nuts and tried to conquer the known universe, Coristo Corp. decided to beat the Chrysop to Sector 23, and sent a particular kind of colony ship to the worlds there, to populate them with humans.  Coristo Corp. had absorbed Humogen Corp. by this time, and had the genetic engineers on staff to do it.

They were seeder ships, Best Beloved.  They used trik instead of regular gravite to power their FTL engines, which was okay, because the only living things on those ships were genetic materials frozen in solution.  If you had seen those ships, they would have surprised you.  They were very small, for FTL ships — barely the size of shuttles, and they had doughnut-shaped rings of trik surrounding each them.  There were five of them, strung together like beads, one for each planet Coristo had its eye on, which was selfish, because no human had ever seen those worlds.  They were only known because of Eichee exploration maps, centuries old.  And it was unfair, too, because Coristo Corp. had made no planetary surveys, made no atttempts to preserve indiginous life, not even if it was sentient.

But that is best left behind, as it happened so long ago and there is nothing any of us can do about it now.  We do not even know if those ships made it to their destinations.  No one wants to know, because the kind of people they were going to make would be much different from us.  Much more different than the kind of people Humogen Corp. made to live on Haran, and you know how odd they are.  You see, the people the seeder ships would make would have been truly telepathic, linked into the Memory not by implants, but by nature.  They were to have trik molecules sowed into their brains, and that is something we don’t even want to think about.

And that is the end of my story, O Best Beloved, and I hope you remember it.

Excerpt from the transcript of the trial of Martin Pak, sole survivor of Lavenham.  Note: Subject was expressing the super-personality at the time of the interview.

“Oh, Lavenham, well.  There’s nothing to be done for Lavenham, how can I have any regret there?  They were lost from the beginning.  It’s not Lavenham I think about, but the five worlds of Sector 23.  It will be, let’s see, another fifty years before the seeder ships arrive, is that right?  I wish they could be stopped, but there’s no hope for that is there?  Is there?  That’s what I thought.  Yes, I am sorry for Lavenham, but the worlds of Sector 23, they’ll pay the most for what we did.”

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Oh, JZ. But at least it gives you the idea for what is going on. I happen to have read Valencia, which takes place on one of the Seeder worlds, and let me tell you, they are messed up. Not as messed up as the people in the Masters of Haven, but that is another story for another day.

Thanks for reading

The Queen.

Queen here. While our typing committee has been working to get this website together, we have discovered something rather disturbing. Did you know that if you’re not careful on the computer, you might buy something you didn’t intend to buy? It’s True! It appears this internet thing is designed to trick the unsuspecting into handing out a credit card number for a product you didn’t really need!!! I mean, really. Why do humans do these things to each other? What humans need is a Queen. In our village, all you need is one opinion. No argument, no back-biting, no taking advantage of each other. Simple.

Well, except for the Raccoons. Call me a speciesist, but I’m convinced that raccoons are destined to be criminals. I mean, they have that burglar’s mask and everything, to say nothing of the striped tail. It’s almost as if they were designed that way. In this case, they were, since it appears our holder drew the mask on with a permanent marker, and fitted them up with striped tails made of pipe cleaners. Heaven only knows what kind of creatures they were before they were raccoons. I’m not even sure they’re real Calico Critters. They just sort of showed up, so what can you do.

Anyway, week after week, we’re getting this social media thing put together. We hope you like it. We found out just yesterday that Google had found us. It seems that they have to crawl the internet to find new websites and index them. I told the King that ‘crawling’ maybe wasn’t the best mode of transport. Perhaps they should try ‘running’ or ‘hopping’, or any number of animal-related gaits that we’re conversant with. But nobody asks us.

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.

Queen here. I’ve explained how hard it is to manage a keyboard when your elbows don’t bend. But thinking when your head is hollow is even tougher. Who knew creating a website would be so hard? And where are my posts? I tried to move them into a new page and they all disappeared. And I thought running a kingdom was hard!

The King says I worry too much. Take my time, think things through… Right now I’ve got three of my people operating the Kindle, looking up help on the internet. They keep shouting out suggestions, but when you’ve got a team on the keyboard, sometimes the A before the B, if you know what I mean. Good thing Ms. Tabby, our schoolteacher, knows how to spell.

I think the real problem is that none of us have a lot of experience with the internet. I mean, this is our first experience with social media. Mr. Hedgehog says we should have conquered Facebook first. Or spent our time hanging out with a teenager. They do this stuff instinctively. It’s not so easy for a toy created to entertain 4 year olds.

The things we do to help our holder.