Monday, August 8, 2016


“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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