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.”

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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.