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:
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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’.
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(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.