The Crystal Intelligences...
Johnny1a
post:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/msg/e693e520f0e44586?hl=en&&q=solarigens
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let us turn out gaze back across the millennia, to the star Sol and
its family of planets and moons circa ~73,000 BC. What we would see
would be the great effort by the Familiar Eldren to move the
Homosentient genus off Earth, to their new homes prepared on
terraformed worlds scattered across the Milky Way and its satellary
galaxies. We would see at one crucial point a struggle erupt between
two factions of the Eldren, a brief but fantastic battle which would
end in the leadership of each faction trapped on Earth by a
malfunctioning weapon of one side, in a barely-conscious state, and we
would see the remainder of each faction commanded by a higher and
older (much the same thing among the Eldren) authority to cease their
argument and leave Earth and the other biologically active worlds
untouched and unapproached.
This was the culmination of a long history of Eldren interventions in
the Solar System, a very spare outline of which has already been told
in the thread 'The Solarigens'. This explanation was _far_ from
complete, however, it is difficult to compress half a billion years
into a few words.
The Familiar Eldren, as has been told, were young as their kind went,
the equivalent, very, _very_ roughly, of what a modern Terran might
call high school and undergrad and post-grad students among their
leaders. They had many interests, of which the Heliagen and Solarigen
life types were merely two. One of these Familiar Eldren had a
particular personal side-hobby that would later have significant
influence on Terran and Galactic history.
Eldren do not have personal names, as such. They recognize each other
as individuals, certainly, but their personal 'identifiers' are a sort
of telepathic 'signature' denoting their whole personality, which
simply can not be translated into any Homosentient language. For our
convenience, however, we must denote this particular Eldren and since
they don't have names of their own, we'll assign it a name.
We'll call this particular Eldren 'Hermes', for reasons we'll get to
momentarily.
Hermes was younger than the Watcher, but still very old as
Homosentients consider time, it had been conscious for about 750
million Terran years, give or take a few hundred thousand Terran
years. It had joined the Watcher's project during what Terrans call
the Cretaceous Period, making it a relative newcomer, but it had
proven very useful in the overall project.
Hermes' side project is very recent, by comparison, dating back a
little over one million years before the present. It all started when
the Sun happened to undergo a particularly active flare-sunspot cycle,
more intense than anything in recorded Homosentient history, but
nothing untoward, Sol had matched this level of activity hundreds of
thousands of times before. In this case, at the height of the solar
cycle, Hermes noticed that the electromagnetic effects the star was
generating included some peculiar phenomena on the planet we call
Mercury.[1]
Hermes found its curiosity piqued, and travelled to Mercury to observe
these effects closely. One it became aware of them, Hermes realized
that these odd phenomena were ongoing, it was merely that the
exceptionally active flare cycle had made them particularly
noticeable. Hermes found these effects interesting, and spend a
considerable amount of time studying them.
What Hermes found was that certain mineral complexes on Mercury,
shaped by the weird local conditions of heat and cold and radiation,
'resonated' in odd ways with the electrical, magnetic, and Flux
activity generated by the roiling activity of the Sun. These
resonances could actually replicate themselves, individually they
lasted only a few seconds at most, but they could shape new resonance-
fields out of the local background to replace themselves. They
certainly weren't alive, but they shared some of the qualities of life-
forms.
Calling them 'resonances' is the best English can do, these 'entities'
were not pure energy, they were more like patterns of charged
particles, swirling in vortices of magnetic and Flux pressure. Some
of the particles were familiar, some would not even be classifiable
under the Standard Model. These 'entities' would have been utterly
invisible to the unaided 'conventional' senses of any Homosentient,
though some ESPers _might_ have been able to perceive these things.
The appropriate instruments could certainly detect them. [2]
Hermes found their replicatory ability interesting, and began studying
to see if it could induce them to carry and replicate more complex
patterns. At first it met with little success, even the slightest
outside interference with a resonance tended to disrupt it beyond
repair, Hermes had to master a delicacy of touch few Eldren ever had a
need for, but at last, after nearly ten thousand Terran years of
effort, it discovered ways to manipulate these resonances, to add
complexity to them, without disruption. Another few centuries led the
Eldren to the point that it could induce successful replication of
these patterns through several 'generations' of resonances.
It also learned that it could, if it set conditions up just so, cause
individual resonances to endure longer than their 'natural' span
(which was usually no more than a few seconds). Hermes considered it
a major success when it began to be able to keep resonances going for
as long as about a Terran minute. [3]
A larger breakthrough came after Hermes had been studying these things
for nearly 25,000 Terran years: it finally learned enough to generate
its own 'artificial' resonance-vortices.
MORE LATER.
[1] Hence the name 'Hermes'.
[2] Including such high-tech devices as a magnetic compass, which
would spin madly near one, even on Earth, except that these crude
natural entities could not have endured on Earth more than a few
nanoseconds at best.
[3] The Eldren certainly did not use Terran time units, of course,
these are approximations.
Johnny1a
the matter was the combination of a high level of ambient solar energy
to be found on Mercury, together with the specific electromagnetic
conditions produced by the interaction of certain mineral structures
and the Sun's relatively near-at-hand magnetic field. The vortices
tended to form near certain mineral structures that formed as a
natural side-effect of the geophysical processes active on Mercury.
These mineral structures were not common, but not rare either,
especially along the equatorial zone.
The resonances Hermes was studying were confined to the day side of
Mercury, as a given location rotated slowly toward the long night of
Mercury's star side, they would dissipate, while new ones formed along
the terminator as the active sites emerged from darkness. Hermes
began studying the structures that enabled the formation of the
vortices, seeking to create them artificially. Hermes discovered how
to generate its own vortices on the pre-existing active sites long
before it finally understood the formation of the vortices well enough
to create the necessary circumstances entirely on its own. It took
Hermes thousands of Terran years to finally reach the point at which
it could make its own 'active sites' and there create its own self-
replicating electromagnetic vortices.
Hermes did not watch its experiments constantly, it was always part of
the overall project the Watcher was running, and it had its own
interests among the other Eldren entirely independent of the worlds of
Sol. Hermes would return and check on and update its work on Mercury
every few centuries to update it and extend the work. Still, over
time the scale and complexity of the project grew, until at one point
Hermes had millions of artificial resonance-vortices operating at
once. It discovered that it could introduce variations in the
structures that would be replicated by the new vortices spawned from
the earlier 'generations', but only simple ones, anything complex
tended to disrupt the vortex entirely. Nor did any 'spontaneous'
change ever self-replicate, the results of any significant spontaneous
change was invariably disruption.
The time each individual vortex lasted increased as Hermes'
understanding of the processes involved grew, until eventually Hermes
found a way to maintain the resonances essentially indefinitely: the
Eldren found a way to 'encase' a resonance-vortex in a mineral
containment vessel that prevented disruption. This happened about
250,000 BC. It took about ten thousand Terran years (give or take)
for Hermes to learn how to make a 'contained' vortex replicate itself,
it required finding a way for the mineral containment vessel to
replicate itself out of the necessary raw materials, and it took
almost endless amounts of trial and error to produce a workable
solution, but eventually Hermes did succeed.
It should be noted that these creations of Hermes were not alive, they
were not nearly complex enough for that. They _did_ replicate
themselves...but not with the level of vitality and variation that
living creatures showed, and they had no instinct of self-
preservation, replication, or anything else. However, they did have
the capacity to show some of the traditionally-ascribed features of
living systems, when stimulated to do so. Hermes now left the massed
contained vortices to operate largely unsupervised, 'directed' to
replicate regularly, and it was during this period that something
vitally important happened, something no Eldren, including Hermes
itself, could fully explain. Somewhere during one of these
unsupervised periods, a Genesis Event occurred.
To the knowledge of the Familiar Eldren, there had been two Genesis
Events. The first to be discovered had occurred on the distant planet
Helius, and had marked the beginning of Heliagen (helium-based) life.
The second to be discovered occurred on Earth and gave rise to the
Terran, Martian, and Ionian life-types, collectively known as the
'Solarigen' life forms. [1]
Neither instance had been observed by any Eldren, nor had the Eldren
ever succeeded in creating anything that could plausibly be called
'artificial life', though some attempts had been made. Indeed, the
Mercurian electromagnetic vortex-entities could be called such an
effort. The Eldren were fascinated by the question of the origin of
life, but in its core it remained a mystery, save _perhaps_ to the
First Generation, who refused to discuss the matter even with younger
Eldren.
Now, to the frustration of the Familiar Eldren, and Hermes not least,
a Genesis Event finally occurred in one of their experiments...and
they had missed it.
MORE LATER
[1] Though the Heliagen life was discovered by the Eldren first, they
had no way to know whether Heliagen or Solarigen life was actually
older _as a type_.
Johnny1a
Mercurian experiments on its regular schedule, it had been 2500 Terran
years (approximately) since Hermes had last visited, and when it
arrived it was nearly boggled by the changes it found.
One of its active sites had been completely rearranged, one particular
'line' of replicating entity had completely swamped it, and were
actually spreading _beyond_ it, converting raw minerals into new
containment vessels, and there were different _kinds_ of them,
spontaneous changes were now replicating true over and over, and with
a wild exuberance that was beyond anything Hermes had been able to
produce by intent. Furthermore, the new strains of entity were
showing all the classic traits of living things in terms of their
urges of self-replication and survival.
The Familiar Eldren, when Hermes shared the news with them, were
stunned beyond belief, and frustrated to their cores, because they had
apparently managed to finally do by accident what they had never been
able to do by intent, and they had missed the critical moment or
moments entirely, leaving them as much in the dark as ever!
Hermes continued its experiments, now directing the process through
various experimental projects, observing which successfully adapted
and replicated and which did not. It cleared out the failed active
sites, allowing the new living strains to 'colonize' them, save for
some that it preserved in what turned out to be a futile effort to
replicate the Genesis Event. As time passed, Mercury became host to
thousands of strains of these entities, some of which were steadily
increasing in complexity and ability as a result of the constant
evolutionary pressure Hermes was applying by means of its various
experiments.
Throughout all this, Hermes attempted to define precisely what the
differences were between its new 'living' entities and the former
versions, but it found this to be fiendishly difficult to do in
practice. Every specific, individual trait it singled out proved to
be difficult to assign solely to one or the other, Hermes was unable
to pin down a _precise_ specific defining difference...yet there was
no question of the difference. It was as if a million _small_ things
added up to the difference between 'alive' and 'life-like', making
specific definitions almost impossible and yet producing an
unmistakable difference. [1]
The other Familiar Eldren were interested in the new life-kind, but it
was still so simple and unvaried compared to Heliagen and Solarigen
life that most of their attention remained on the older life-types.
Hermes, for obvious reasons, was an exception, fascinated by the new
kind of life that was beginning to thrive and spread on Mercury.
Hermes was still closely occupied with the new 'Mercuriform' life when
everything came to a jarring halt around ~73,000 BC. When the great
argument between the Watcher and the Rival broke out, Hermes joined
with its friend and was caught up in the ensuing catastrophe, bound
helplessly not on Earth like most of its fellow entrapped Eldren but
on Mercury, as a result of a last desperate effort to break free from
the trap that had befallen its fellows on Earth.
Hermes was not able to break free of the effect, but it _did_
successfully reach Mercury before falling into a nearly helpless
trance-like state, and moments after that the higher authorities among
the Eldren stopped the fight, and forbade direct interference by the
remaining free Familiar Eldren or the Rival's associates.
Hermes was nearly unconscious, barely able to influence events at all,
like its fellow entrapped Familiar Eldren on Earth. Like them, it
sought ways to influence events so as to free itself, and it noted the
actions of some of the Familiar Eldren on Earth in creating their
Avatars. It knew it needed something similar, but its options were
far more limited. Earth had a rich biosphere of almost limitless
potential to draw upon, Mercury's equivalent life-array was many
orders of magnitude less complex and various, and its means of
reproduction did not lend themselves to the sort of manipulation that
had been used to make the Avatars. Still, there were a few advantages
lying in dealing with Mercuriform life rather than Solarigen life.
For one thing, Mercuriform life was evolving toward greater complexity
_far_ faster than Solarigen life had, in large part because of the
constant pressure from Hermes, this pressure was now much reduced, but
it could be applied still with great difficulty. For another, the
very _simplicity_ of Mercuriform life compared to either Solarigen or
Heliagen life made for a simplicity of approach. By the time the
Eldren had met the Heliagen and Solarigen life-kinds, they were
already old and sophisticated, much of their basic nature already
written in stone and difficult to either change or work around. Not
so the Mercuriform life-kind.
Thus began Hermes' attempt to create its own version, or equivalent,
of an Avatar.
MORE LATER.
[1] Hermes would not be the last student of life to find it difficult
to define exactly what 'life' was.
Johnny1a
sufficiently well to take the necessary steps to free the trapped
Eldren. This was much easier desired than achieved, Hermes faced a
vastly larger gap between what was available and what was desired than
its 'brethren' trapped on Earth did. The trapped Eldren of Earth
could create their Avatars using already-extant Homosentients,
especially _Homo sapiens_, as an example and a template. The local
biosphere was already sophisticated and powerful enough to be
manipulated into creating these Avatars, as well.
None of this was true in the case of the fledgling Mercurigen
biosphere, if 'biosphere' is even an applicable word. The new
Mercurigen life was still simple, sparse, and had barely begun the
task of transforming Mercury, in the way life tends to transform the
worlds on which it exists. Further, lacking any template to work
from, Hermes had to make everything up from scratch before it could
even begin implementation, a job made the harder by the fact that the
Eldren as a people are not natural, instinctive tool users. They tend
to be lacking in the specific _kinds_ of imagination useful for such
work.
Somewhat offsetting this problem was the nature of Mercurigen
'reproductive biology'. Reproducing asexually (in a sense), the
Mercurigen life forms were of such a nature that massive changes could
occur over the course of a few generations, while leaving the
resulting offspring 'viable'. Evolution could proceed far faster on
Mercury than it ever did on Earth, in part because of the pressure
from Hermes and in part because of the nature of the life-forms.
Increases in complexity and ability that took hundreds of millions of
years on Earth took centuries on Mercury, and gradually, Hermes
produced a 'species' of Mercurigen life that was somewhat suitable for
its needs. The result of Hermes' project was not quite the same as
the Avatars of Earth, though.
The Avatars of Earth actually 'contained' fragments of their creating
Eldren, riding within, so to speak. On Mercury, what Hermes created
instead was a 'species' (for want of a better word, we'll get into the
details of Mercurigen reproduction and biology later) of Mercuriforms
who had sufficient manipulative ability and intelligence to be able to
carry out some of its wishes, albeit imperfectly. Hermes was barely
conscious most of the time, and it could communicate its wishes to its
'offspring' only imperfectly when it was, but they _were_ taking the
beginning steps necessary to free Hermes from its imprisonment.
This in itself was complicated. Given enough time, the trance-state
binding the Eldren would pass on its own, but that would have required
several million years, and the trapped Eldren, for all their
immortality, were not inclined to wait that long. The plan to make
its escape had to be formulated by Hermes in its waking, lucid moments
(which might last anywhere from a few moments to a few Terran days at
a time), and the plan required gathering information and making
constant adjustments along the way. Once formulated, the original
plan and its ongoing changes had to be successfully communicated to
the servitors entities, who then had to carry it out, mostly without
conscious supervision, which meant that the work often went awry,
subtly or grossly. Each time Hermes 'awakened' to check the work, it
seemed that something always had to be redone or changed or adjusted.
It was all too slow a process, made the more so by the limitations of
the servitor creatures Hermes had managed to 'force-evolve' into
existence. There was a constant Darwinian pressure driving the
servitors toward an emphasis on behaviors that served their
reproductive success, away from Hermes' projects, which did after all
involve a diversion of energy away from the struggle to survive and
reproduce. Hermes had to periodically act to make sure this pressure
did not take away his servitor creatures entirely.
Still, bit by painstaking bit, the project was going forward.
This process had barely begun in earnest, though, when everything was
changed by events in the year 4750 BC.
MORE LATER.
mike
Humm...
>Given enough time, the trance-state binding the Eldren would
>pass on its own, but that would have required several million
>years, and the trapped Eldren, for all their
>immortality, were not inclined to wait that long.
I'm curious to know, as these Eldren were trapped
and, 'stunned?', when the Adults gave the command
to leave the Earth and Sol-life alone, does this mean
it doesn't apply to them?
(The only one that should be able to act would be Herm,
since it's not playing with forbidden life forms?)
Or are they all unaware of this law?
After all, they are all working to escape via manipulating
the local life, suggesting they are not so restricted.
But presumably they would've expected the other
free Eldren to come to their aid, or did i miss something?
Anyway, once free, are these Eldren
bound by that keep off rule?
mike :-)
Keep postin'. I'm enjoying this.
Johnny1a
> Humm...
>
> >Given enough time, the trance-state binding the Eldren would
> >pass on its own, but that would have required several million
> >years, and the trapped Eldren, for all their
> >immortality, were not inclined to wait that long.
>
> I'm curious to know, as these Eldren were trapped
> and, 'stunned?', when the Adults gave the command
> to leave the Earth and Sol-life alone, does this mean
> it doesn't apply to them?
Good catch. It _doesn't_ apply to them.
The initial squabble that resulted in the Watcher, the Rival, and some
of their respective posses being entrapped was spreading. From the
Adult point of view, it was like a schoolyard fight that's suddenly
spreading as each fighter's buddies rush in to back up their side, so
the Adults stopped it, and forbade those Eldren still free to act from
intervening further or even approaching closer to Earth (actually a
sphere of space centered on Sol) then roughly 5 light-days. There
are no restrictions on the initial trapped Eldren other than what
they're _able_ to do.
Why did they leave the trapped ones trapped? Because it's no big deal
from the Adult POV, if a few younglings are trapped by their own
foolishness for a little while. It'll only last a few million years
at most, and that's _nothing_ to beings older than the oldest star.
It's like parents ignoring two squabling kids who've hit each other
and are upset. An hour later and it's over. On the Adult scale, a
few million years is no different.
> But presumably they would've expected the other
> free Eldren to come to their aid, or did i miss something?
The younger Eldren, the Familiar Eldren and the Rival's bunch, _would_
like to help their friends, but they're bound by an Adult command.
It's unthinkable to defy that directly, but that doesn't mean both
sides haven't been looking hard for loopholes, too. :lol:
> Anyway, once free, are these Eldren
> bound by that keep off rule?
> mike :-)
Nope. If they can get free, they're free to act. Which means it's
not in the interest of the Human race for the Rival to get free while
the Watcher isn't, because Bad Things would likely follow. The Rival
bears us no _personal_ grudge, but it knows it could really annoy the
Watcher by burning Earth's biosphere down to the bedrock and leaving
that glowing and clicking hot. Which it could arrange to have happen,
if it were free.
Actually, I should say the Rival didn't _originally_ bear us any
personal grudge, but things can change...
>
> Keep postin'. I'm enjoying this.
Glad to hear it! :grin: