“The
Old Ones and the Coethi: One and the Same?”
The villains of Tales
of the Quantum Corps are called the Old Ones. The adversary in The Farpool is called the Coethi.
I have used similar descriptions for both. Should I make them the same entity? For a storyteller, what are the advantages
and disadvantages?
Here are some details about the Coethi:
1. The
Coethi are (thought to be) a race of sentient semi-robotic aliens whose main
weapon against Uman forces is something Umans called a starball. It is directed
against the sun or star of a targeted Uman planetary system. The only known defense is a Time
Twister. When a starball enters or is
pulled into the twist field of a Twister, it is flung out of local space-time
into the farthest reaches of the Universe.
2. Umans
and Coethi are contending for influence and territory in a region of the Milky
Way known as the Galactic Halo.
3. The
main-sequence star Sigma-Albeth B is near the center of a key sector of the
Halo. It has four planets, one of them
Seome. Seome is an ideal site to build
and operate a Time Twister to defend this sector, known to Humans as Halo-Alpha. The sector is above the plane of the galactic
Orion Arm, in which most of Uman space is located, including the solar system
and its strategic timestreams T-1 to T-99.
4. The
Coethi originated in the Perseus Arm and view the Halo sectors as convenient
ways to expand their territory and influence into the Orion and other arms in
this quadrant of the galaxy. But the
Umans are in the way.
5. The
Coethi are a distributed intelligence.
They are a swarm of nanoscale robotic elements several light years in
extent, drifting through space.
6. The
basic element of the Coethi is a nanobot.
An autonomous, nanoscale assembler/disassembler of incredible
sophistication and complexity.
7. Nobody
knows how the Coethi came to be, even the Coethi themselves. As an organized superorganism of bots several
light-years in extent, they have existed for a substantial fraction of the age
of the Universe. Best guess by Earth
scientists is 4-5 billion years old.
8. The
Coethi are a true superswarm of vast proportions. In size and extent and connection density, it
exceeds the complexity of all the human minds that have ever lived on Earth
combined. It is a thinking sentience,
whose true environment is now interstellar space.
9. There
is an archive of knowledge within the Coethi, a sort of computational cloud or
main memory, which retains all information ever created or experienced by the
swarm.
10. Within
this Archive is information indicating that the Coethi originated on an actual
homeworld, somewhere in M75 cluster in Sagittarius. The data show that the homeworld was
destroyed by a nearby supernova and the surviving elements dispersed into space
in a sort of interstellar diaspora. As
humans reckon universe time, this happened at least 4-6 billion years ago, at a
time when the Universe was approximately 7 billion years after the Big Bang.
11. There
is no known head or leadership group or body.
The main part is called the Central Entity.
12. Nanobotic
elements of the Coethi engage in some specialization to ensure that the swarm
survives and the Central Entity is maintained.
Bots can specialize in such tasks as logical processing, communication,
maintenance, archiving and memory, internal transport, navigation,
world-seeding, orientation, etc.
13. Part
of the Coethi swarm is organized as a vast logic array or processor, capable of
quantum computation on a stupendous scale.
Effectively, this could be considered the Central Entity. IT people
would call it a galactic scale CPU. But
the truth is that the Coethi are a true collective entity whose behavior
evolves from relatively simple rules applied to a vast congregation. Most sentience and observable behavior
emanating from the Coethi is emergent from the complexity and scale of the
nanobotic connections.
14. It’s
not too farfetched to consider the Coethi as a sort of galactic brain, although
it certainly doesn’t encompass the entire Milky Way galaxy.
15. But
the Coethi have an Imperative of Life which compels them to grow and expand the
swarm. Ultimately, they want to unite
all world-based instances of swarm life which they have seeded into a giant,
galaxy-spanning swarm or hive mind (like a neural network or computational
cloud). To the Coethi, this is the
Imperative of Life itself. The
Imperative of Life is that life absorbs chaos from the Universe and adds or
builds structure or order. Life is
anti-entropic.
16. In
order to get their heads around the idea of the Coethi, some descriptors Uman
scientists have used have been: galactic brain, interstellar neural network,
computational cloud, galactic internet, and universal web. The basic organizing principle or topology of
the Coethi is unknown and can only be speculated about.
17. The
general physical dimensions of the Coethi swarm have been estimated to vary
anywhere from a few billion kilometers in breadth to several light years. Cosmologists say that a number of organized
structures in the Universe are that big.
Astronomers point to some nebula, gas and dust clouds, even black holes
as objects of that dimension or larger.
There are some cosmologists who question whether the Coethi swarm is
truly alive in a traditional sense. Even
biologists say the proven existence of the Coethi stretches the definition of
life and sentience nearly to the breaking point.
18. The
Coethi can manipulate quantum states of the subscale fine structure of space
itself to communicate and affect matter at great distances. As one scientist
says, “If the Universe were a great
quilt, the Coethi can yank on a fiber at one end and untie a knot at the other.” Their ability to use quantum entanglement as
a means of manipulation is eons ahead of Umans’ ability to understand, let
alone emulate.
19. The
Coethi launch a starball weapon by amassing vast, concentrated quantities of
what Uman scientists call fusium. They concentrate the fusium and focus it using part of the main swarm, then launch the
starball at a star or sun.
20. The
starball affects the balance between outward pressure of fusion in the star’s
core and its gravity. Basically, the
starball slows down or inhibits the fusion reactions so that gravity slowly
wins out. The star collapses and may, if
massive enough, go supernova.
My
descriptions of the Old Ones (from Tales of the Quantum Corps) are very similar.
What are the advantages of using the same adversary in both series?
Advantages:
1. I
don’t have to re-invent things. Basic
details are already thought out.
2. Using
the same adversary gives me the option of some day blending Tales of the Quantum Corps and The Farpool Stories into one story
universe, if I want to. That decision
has not been made yet.
3. I
now even have the option of doing stories from the perspective of the
Coethi/Old Ones themselves.
Disadvantages:
1. Is
having the same or very similar villains in two different series plausible?
2. Do
the villains have enough ‘depth’ or can I develop enough to make it work?
3. Do
I really want to draw these two series together into one universe? Yes, it adds many story possibilities and a
lot of conflict potential, but still….there would be a lot of details and
questions that would have to be resolved.
I
leave the idea with you for the time being.
Readers of this blog should not be shy about weighing in on this
question. I’m open to suggestions.
The
next post to The Word Shed will be
come on August 15 and will cover a topic dear to any writer’s heart…getting
paid vs (for an ebook writer) making your titles free.
See
you on August 15.
Phil
B.
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