Topic: Genesis
I find it interesting how ideas evolve, how they move on from original concepts I’m initially excited about to visions I hadn’t contemplated, and how major characters imagined are swept aside and others take center stage. I’d thought I’d share the process. So here is Part 1: In the Beginning. . . .
The seed of The Temperance Well spawned in July 22, 2008 with this idea:
. . . a moon, much like ours, with the exception that most of its face is dark leaving a rim of lighter material around the edge. Together with a prominent crater with ejecta rays, these features lend the moon its common and obvious name of "the Wheel". . . .
The story is one of First Contact of a sort. It is a far future story in which the colonization of an earthlike planet experiences technological regression after several hundred years. The setting is a mix of 19th century and much later. The plot centers around rediscovery of the planet by another group of humans seeking information this old colony may have of the Lost Worlds.
And later on August 6 of 2008 with this passage:
"Disaster!
Our very near future is shattered by the unexpected opening of a wormhole just beyond the Moon's orbit. Something very much like an asteroid has emerged from it at speeds very much approximating an asteroid's.
It is not an asteroid, but an apparently inoperable space going vessel on a collision course.
Humanity has but less than a few days. . .
Impact!
The large craft begins to burn up and disintegrate as it plows through the atmosphere. Most of it does, smaller pieces remain, raining down. The bulk of the craft explodes violently in an airburst of hundreds of megatons of TNT over the Pacific. A strange and mysterious powerful object survives! The several meters diameter spherical object hits the water blowing out a superheated cone of water/steam. It hits the ocean floor with tremendous force and buries itself deep into the crust.
It is not finished. It wondrous properties attract it to the gravitational center of the planet and it begins to move toward the core on a journey that will take it many hundreds of years to complete.
Apocalypse!
Millions are dead, thousands are dying. Ecological disaster! Economic collapse! All our petty problems are eclipsed by this global catastrophe.
Salvation!
It comes in the form of advanced intelligence, from beyond the reopened wormhole. They tell us the object that survived will kill the planet. It will shut down the core, it will cool the mantle, it will lock the tectonic plates. The planet will cool, become lifeless to humans.
They offer Exodus.
Thousands of years later, humanity has commandeered that alien technology. Someone is looking for the Lost Worlds, for the Earth remnant. For that mysterious powerful object. . . "
On the 17th of August, 2008, I expanded the idea of Kha, the hyperdimensional being seeking that mysterious powerful object.
Finding the Shards was tedious work. They were undetectable from his realm for the most part. He had traced the last one to a planet populated with nascent sapience. In his perspective that planet traveled a helix around the strand of its sun; it was a cable that stretched from its creation—an intertwining of smaller strands spiraling in wild helixes—to its end—a fraying of strands.
He had been directed to place near the middle of the sun's length. Moving in closer, the planet strand divided into two distinct cables, one a ribbon of moon. If he focused his senses toward the planet, he would detect a multitude of strands wrapping around it. Deeper down, the strand of the planet would resolve into billions of tiny interwoven filaments. His attention wasn't directed there.
From his vantage he moved, interested in the anomaly of strands that began in empty space and merged down to the planet, and sprang out again. Where they appeared and disappeared he knew was the phenomenon of the sphere-hole, which he could not see unless he moved beyondward where they appeared as a mass of tangled stretched tunnels.
One isolated strand grew out of the planet, reaching out just beyond the orbit of the moon. This would be the Jau'Tak craft the Apax where chasing, no doubt a part of their war coming to the unsuspected sapiens below.
The Last Shard was embedded in the Jau'Tak craft. It was not a shard to them. It's lower dimensional cross-section was spherical, its color a deep cobalt. From inside, a band of energy vibrated, twisted, oscillated, giving off a faint glow from its deep center. It danced to unknown rhythms. The Jau'Tak were using it as a power source. They had no idea of its true potential. He guessed the Apax did, but they had not the means to tap it.
To be certain the craft carried the Shard in its core, he dipped a tendril of himself into that lower dimension, onto the liquid surface of the planet near where the craft would impact. Thereupon the energy that comprised his being began to condense into matter. He directed the formation of this new flesh into a simple form, a tubular, dark gray mass, seeming to stand erect on the waves of the deep ocean. He grew a multitude of eyes and other sensors to see all wavelengths of photonic energy. Waves crashed upon him but didn't he feel the water. He only saw the craft.
It fell on its collision course. The Jau'Tak were punishing the Apax for having an interest in the young race that populated the planet. It was a petulant and self-indulgent gesture, but the Jau'Tak where known for such conduct. The craft was the size of small celestial body, a fireball heating to plasma in the atmosphere, parts of it breaking free. He felt exotic forces pulling on him, forces that could only emanate from the Shard. Forces that were directly undetectable in these dimensions.
The fireball grew closer. He felt the song of the Shard, stirring him, coaxing deep instincts.
He began to resonant. It would have been a disturbing and deafening sound to any living creature nearby to hear.
The impact of craft superheated the ocean. A tsunami formed, racing out. It would be many minutes before the shockwave and superheated air reached him. The core of the craft still retained much of its momentum. An incredible explosion ejected water and rock from the depths.
He pulled his tendril from that world, his flesh transforming back into energy in the process. The Shard would bury itself into the planetary core, sucking up its energy, poisoning the planet, leaving it lifeless.
The Apax, wracked with guilt for being culpable in the destruction, offered their exodus. The strands of their craft merged and diverged from the planet cable, terminating cleanly in sphere-holes. The Apax were spreaders, in both space and time. The nascent sapience would be distributed across many epochs in their future.
He would have to lure some of them back, to crack the planet and take the Shard.
And to deliver it to the Temperance Well.
After jotting down a few pages of notes on planets and cultures and technology, I envisioned a planet with regressed technology that had the map back to long lost Earth. I saw a war between God-fearing human machines and posthuman demigods seeking the Lost Shard to enable their victory over the other. I saw non-humanoid aliens with bioengineered human spokesmen, with their own designs for the Shard, and Kha, with “his” human agents seeking the same. It was a race, but a race to what?
The creation of the universe? That was kind of the idea . . . I’m glad I’ve abandoned it.
I did write (Nov. 29th, 2008) a little about this war between machine and demigod, but eventually I felt that the war angle was uninspired and unimaginative. War is such an overused concept.
They couldn’t hold the picket line in the globular cluster for very long. Twenty-three war-craft spread out like so many beads falling from the string of a broken necklace under the intense radiation bath of blue-white stars. Gansun saw in his mind from the immersion dataflow, each of the ovoid craft, bristling with spires and blades of weapons and sensors, luminous and shimmering from the omnidirectional light. His people knew there would be no hiding here for very long. They had fled here hoping the hostile environment would deter their fearful enemy.
The sensor pulse propagated through the dataflow tactical sensorium in Gansun's mind. He pushed the imagery into his background processing, thinking the enemy would come when they were ready, and turned his head to look at the woman standing beside him. Garna's beautiful face held an expression of deep focus to her duties and tasks as her hands and their long graceful fingers splayed in the soft and viscous liquid metal interface of the control console.
He pinged her and she startled, then turned to look at him. He pulled a hand from the interface and laid it gently atop hers, giving it a squeeze. In one small moment, they shared each other’s desperation and fear, their grief and anger, followed by a ghostly fantasy of intimacy and passion. Then the watchdog broke them of their reverie, commanding them back to their duties.
Gansun pulled away reluctantly, forcing himself to firewall his feelings for Garna. He longed to be with her in their intimate sanctuary of cyberspace, but he knew it was best to only use the open communication network to speak to her. Hand back in the flowing interface, Gansun locked his mentality to the task of monitoring and maintaining his assigned sector shield.
The globular cluster's sea of energy remained just as dangerous as their enemy. The shields protecting the ship strained under the constant electromagnetic assault, and even then what filtered through was enough to damage and disrupt their mechanical bodies and electro-optic minds given enough exposure. The fleet had been here for some time and the damage was becoming noticeable. Some of the crew had already been downloaded to thick walled modules and stored in the ship's core, their bodies recycled to their atomic elements.
From the dataflow, Gansun knew where all three hundred of the crew of 34 Apex were and where they were going. With this information, he permitted the shield to filter through more harmful radiation where the crew were absent. Thus the shield retained its vitality.
It wasn't long after that the event they feared most had come upon them. The Overmind gave its warning ping across the dataflow, bringing forth tactical imagery into Gansun's mind. The enemy ships were unsurprisingly very similar to their own, larger, yet with shorter spires. The enemy arrayed its formation into a dense conical cluster. Their numbers were undeterminable, yet estimated at less than a hundred. They were closing fast, which would make them difficult to hit even with their own terrible weapons.
From the dataflow Gansun was aware of the fleet taking a defensive formation, pulling together in the form of a large hemisphere to surround their attackers.
<Internal Security prepare for boarders!> the Overmind announced over the comm-net.
Gansun saw the horrible continuum distortions curving the local hyperspace and set his shields for maximum interference.
The Overmind called again, <All personnel initiate self backups and download to emergency processors!>
Gansun slowed his subjective time rate, made a backup copy of himself, then succeeded in closing an enemy hyperspacial tunnel. He felt the backup purge through his interface and reopened his shared cyberspace with Garna. He needed her.
-If they board here, at least we won’t remember it,- he said to her.
She nodded almost imperceptivity, -I've never lost this body. It terrifies me to think of doing so.-
-It's not that hard to get readjusted to a new one,- he found himself lying to reassure her.
Garna felt his subconscious overlay. -That's a nice gesture,- she said of his prevarication.
Their conversation terminated as he wrestled with another boarding attempt. It was merely a probe, for he saw their plan immediately. They had sent multiple distortions to a weaker shield section to overwhelm. Gansun looked up across the room to Hoytus, who was assigned that sector. The man grimaced in battle. Gansun tried to overlay his adjacent shield but the distortion gradient was too great.
They got through.
<SPHERE-HOLE IN THE ENGINE CORE! SPHERE-HOLE IN THE ENGINE CORE!> the Overmind alerted.
Garna worked furiously with her own defensive sphere-hole creation, attempting to wrap one around the invader's. The feedback would cause severe damage to both ships. It had become the only tactic available against the enemy.
Over the dataflow they both saw the carnage that took place in the engine core. Men stormed out of the hyperspacial gate: tall muscular men, with square blocky faces, and gleaming heads bald save for a tuft of dark bristly hair standing high at the back. They were dressed in lose red swatches, sashes, and kilts. Golden sandals adorned their feet, and golden shin guards with decorative inlays protected their legs. They had identical appearance in every way, and in each right hand they held firmly to a small shield the size of a dinner plate. In the center of this bronze shield was the embossed face of a cherub, that at some unseen and unheard command would open their mouths into an angry, wide, silent scream towards their hapless victims, who would disintegrate, the bonds holding their nanocells together breaking.
They had come up with no defense against this horrible weapon.
Security personnel inhabiting armored bodies fired volleys of microscopic knots of spacetime that couldn't penetrate whatever barriers protected the invaders. It was all in vain, and more an attempt to distract than anything.
Pained and frustrated, Garna yanked her hands from the interface and slammed fists back into it with enough force to cause it to splash sluggishly. All her attempts just slipped of their barriers. –We can't compete against their technology,- she lamented.
-I know,- he replied. Then, -make another backup.- Both fleets' weapons systems were flinging and causing into existence spacetime knots. 34 Apex's hull had become dented and twisted as the knots penetrated surface levels, the tremendous gravity pulling matter to them before they unraveled and flattened. Internal shielding became weakened by the minutes. The knots would reach deeper. Gansun had just seen the 67 Vertex collapse and crumple from a superknot remotely generated into its core. He didn't honestly think the Apex was going to make it.
-I don't have time to!- she retorted, as she coordinated a simultaneous attack on the sphere-hole by the security teams. She trembled as her mind raced, then finally, the barriers were weakened by the assault. She popped another sphere-hole inside the other. The sphere-holes were perfectly coupled. The sphere-hole in their engine core collapsed, leaving the bisected bodies of invaders falling to the deck. The resultant gravity wave disrupted the finer quantum machinery, leading to system failures across the ship.
Garna and Gansun saw on the dataflow tactical the enemy ship they had been coupled to collapse, then explode. –We managed to get a superknot aboard,- she explained.
-Yeah!- he shouted, then, -I've got trouble here!- Another attacker was pounding on his shield sector. There wasn't enough power to multi-layer the shield and any overlay from another shield sector would leave them completely vulnerable. He tried as many hyperspacial curvature patterns that he could to block the tunnels. He knew it was a matter of time before they got through.
They lost two more ships. The fleet Overmind Commander ordered the evacuation of all personnel of drive disabled ships to the others that could escape.
-I'm backing up,- Garna said.
-No! Wait,- he pleaded as he gave up his fight. He pulled his hands from the interface and quickly stepped near her. He put a hand into her interface and embraced her with his free arm. Garna looked at him with shock as a sphere-hole opened in the center of the control room.
Gansun drew his face close to hers. –I love you,- he said kissing her firmly and desperately. Their backup purges left them as angry cherubs silently screamed their destruction.
A cluster of twelve ovoid ships of the human machine fleet has escaped the attack at the globular cluster thousands of lightyears behind them. There was not enough room aboard for all the survivors to inhabit new bodies. Gansun and Garna remained in pure thought-form in a virtual environment, living in a perpetual daydream state. In a lush verdant garden of their making, they lounged naked, appearing as human as the oldest memory of the flesh would allow.
Garna recalled the loss of her original body had been a period of depression and grief whose magnitude she had not expected. But Gansun had been there for her, consoling and loving. And while she had no physical body yet, she was growing accustomed to the more flesh-like form she fancied for herself.
She lay against him on a bed of soft moss, tracing a line of muscle on his arm. "What would you think," she said, "If I requested a body much like this one?"
"It would be possible," Gansun mused. "But such bodies are always inferior. Replicated skin poses a barrier to interface, and—"
She interrupted with a bubbling giggle, "I know all the inferiorities. I could have one like this just for fun."
Gansun grinned taking her hint well. "I suppose," he said, "Then I would have to have one too." He became serious, "We would have to have to have two bodies. And that is something the Scriptures forbid."
She looked into his eyes, understanding completely. Garna recited quietly, "One shall not asunder the soul into Two." The Bifurcation Sin remained their most serious offense. The punishment was the destruction of the copies, and exile for any escaped.
"Don’t fret. I found you beautiful beyond compare before, so any body you choose will be just as beautiful, because it will be yours."
His words moved her so that she felt her love for him would burst her heart. Garna lay her head upon his chest. His hand played in her hair as he stroked her head. "How long before we group up with the main fleet," she asked.
"It could be years," he answered thinking about the random jumps they would have to make to throw off their trail from the enemy. "What do you think of the new mission once we regroup?"
"I don't know," she answered with concern. "I doubt it exists. The Shard is from such deep legend. Who can trust the integrity of the Archive in such matters?"
"It had better exist. With the Shard, our enemy would have no chance against us," he replied. He stared off and felt the ersatz nature of this realm he shared with Garna and the other survivors, isolated in their own partitioned fantasies. He felt a sudden hatred for it. It was a lie. An inescapable lie. "It better exist," he repeated, "Otherwise we will be exterminated simply because we are machines."
The control interface was a little too Cylon Basestar from Battlestar Galactica. Shame on me
Here are the actual notes from April 8th, 2009:
Books of the Temperance Well
The first book must deal with the Last Shard and what it means to those seeking it. This book will start during the Machine-Demigod War, whereby the machines are losing. The machines need a doomsday weapon and out of ancient legend it beckons. I need another plot devise other than war. So they have to verify the existence of the Shard from a nearly forgotten information/memory nexus, one of many storehouses of knowledge dispersed throughout space by their ancestors. Information leads them to the fabled Lost Worlds, but not the location. For that they must approach the Apaxans, and the best they can do is point them to Nurouth. In the middle of this search are battles and pursuit by demigod agents and their Apaxan sympathizers.
Events on Nurouth are Book II, whereby they discover the location of the Lost Worlds from the derelict of the colonizer ship. To make things difficult, the colonizer is under fathoms of ocean.
Book III would involve arriving at the Lost Worlds (those star systems 500 lightyears radial from Earth) and finding a Jau'Tak empire. And the Jau'Tak know exactly where the Shard is, in the core of the transformed Earth. A planet they populate.
Book IV would deal with the problem of extracting the Shard from the core, which means the destruction of the Earth. The Jau'Tak won’t be pleased with development.
Once the Shard is free, Kha takes it. I don't know if this would be included in Book IV or be Book V. I don't know if Kha allows the machines to use it as a weapon, or if the machines have abandoned that idea. Nevertheless, Kha takes it to the remote reaches of intergalactic space (with his human and possibly Apaxan (maybe even Jau'Tak)) companions and creates the Temperance Well, where the purpose of the united Shards is resolved and explained.
Book of the Allodia-Vruscaenau War
This book deals with the introduction of the Last Shard as a relic being sought for its power. The goal is to locate Nurouth. The Apaxan are the only ones who know where it is. The conflict is dealing with the Gloud and Vruscan agents.
Outline
1) Intro Conflict: Gansun, having performed a scout mission in the 41 Octaces, is being pursued by a Vruscan battlecruiser.
a) Scout ship is damaged and cannot inflate a wormhole large enough for it to pass.
b) The battlecruiser is closing, coming within effect range of it probabilistic hypernodal weapons.
c) Gansun establishes a communication link with his distant fleet, and inflates a wormhole just large enough for a high bandwidth transmission.
d) Gansun transmits his scout's data and his mind to the fleet moments before the battle cruiser's hypernode string implodes his craft.
2) Exposition of data: Gansun returns to fleet, his data analyzed.
Old Outline ideas
1) Gansun and his data is received. He remains in an unconscious state while his replacement body is constructed.
a) The data is configured for analysis. It is a mental copy of a Vruscan officer.
b) Gansun's body is ready. He is loaded into it, and is debriefed.
i) Vruscan battle cruiser computer systems not as advanced as themselves and theirs.
ii) Under stealth, Gansun was able to access their computer and mask his gravimetric distortions.
iii) This allowed him to approach the cruiser closely and search for a member of the officer caste.
iv) Upon finding one alone, he captured the man with a wormhole and deposited him aboard the scout.
v) Nanomachines covered the captured officer, destructively digitizing him into a data matrix.
vi) The activity with the wormhole was discovered and Gansun fled the area. A hypernode erupted near his scout and damaged it.
c) An interesting curiosity is discovered with the officer's mental copy by Garna.
i) When the copy is stimulated by keywords such as Jau'Tak, Apaxan, or Exodus, network pathways elude to a mysterious relic of great power.
ii) Garna notifies her superiors but is scoffed because the data isn’t concrete and not of tactical or strategic importance. Something about this is tugging at her, yet she knows not what it is.
d) Gansun and Garna meet for the first time. They speak little beyond greetings, but each yearns for the other.
2) Garna's dilemma: Garna wants to follow up on the powerful relic. None of her coworkers show much interest in helping her.
a) She continues to work with the mental copy trying to uncover more clues. Nothing seems to work. She needs to activate the copy, which is forbidden without going through proper channels. She knows she will be denied.
i) She needs help and decides to coax Gansun into helping her.
ii) Cautious about being direct, she uses her job as an analyst to ask him more questions about the scout mission.
iii) He is suspicious as all his mission data is available for review and there is nothing more to add.
iv) He thinks he knows what she wants given their chance meeting, and asks her out for date.
v) She accepts.
b) After a few more dates, Garna brings up the subject of the officer's memory of the mysterious relic.
i) She tries to persuade Gansun that it is something worth looking into.
ii) He is uncertain, and doesn't like the idea of activating the copy so that they could speak directly to it.
iii) Garna tells him that they could copy the copy and secretly activate that.
iv) Gansun says their careers aren't worth that to throw away. Understanding her deep curiosity and feeling it a little himself, he suggest he may be able to get her permission to activate it legally.
3) Gansun makes the case: Gansun approaches his superior and relays what has happened with Garna.
a) He feels that if her curiosity isn't satisfied, she will go against orders and take matters into her hand.
b) The superiors council and discuss Garna and wonder why what she has found has snared her so.
i) Her heritage is traced.
ii) They discover her ancestors had direct ties to the Atheneul Nexus.
iii) They wonder if she has deep and latent knowledge of antiquity.
iv) Curious themselves, they abide her wishes.
4) Revelations of the Officer: The copy is activated and debriefed.
a) The officer begrudgingly and reluctantly discloses the myth of the Last Shard, the reason why humanity has been spread across the galaxy.
i) If the Vruscan's relocate the Last Shard, they could reunite humanity once again.
ii) This is their goal of ultimate conquest.
iii) It is powerful enough to make a single wormhole for an entire fleet numbering in the thousands.
b) The council is skeptical about these claims, but it is a lead that must be verified.
c) Before they do so, they must contend with Vruscan forces.
5) Battle: Vruscan fleets keep advancing in their pogrom.
a) Vruscan's are sterilizing Allodian planets by steering gamma ray burst through wormholes at target planets.
b) Whole populations must be uploaded to matrix ships in their own exodus to flee the scourge.
c) The Allodian fleet takes refuge in globular cluster where they are able to outlive the pursing fleet.
d) They depart the cluster and are safe for now.
6) Search begins: The council creates a special task force to seek the Atheneul Nexus.
a) As direct descendant, Garna will go.
b) Gansun will also go.
