Author Tony Daniel is acquainted with the Conspiracy. What’s more, The Junior Guide references technologies similar to those of his novels and short fiction: in particular, to the posthuman Large-Array Personalities and the nanotech machinery “grist.”
He shares with us a disturbing anecdote, along with an excerpt from his notebook of ideas.
Tony writes, “I think these are answers to a forced interrogation. I wrote them down during an exercise in lucid dreaming over several months, but I don’t have the other side of the interrogation. I have no recall of writing this.”
So the monsters are actually conglomerations of humans from a bunch of possible worlds who are are “pasted” on top of one another, as it were. They’re amalgamations. The moment when this happened in France is called “La Fusion.”
If you can figure out some of the “scientific laws” of these other worlds, you can use them against the fused.
The overthrow of America is called the Capitulation.
The fused are EVIL. When we die we get two possibilities. We either become our best self and leave the universe behind . . . or all the evil/horrid versions of us. In the old days, all these possible evil “us”es were discarded. Unless we went to hell, in which case the animating principle remained and was suspended in a kind of hellish jelly of possibility.
ALSO
People in L’Amerique are applying to become Party Members — that is, to become monsters. Meanwhile, the other humans need to be kept alive and the economy turning to build up the war machine. World War is coming with France (which has conquered England, Germany and Western Europe) and L’Amerique on one side, Russia, China and the far east on the other.
War also creates a temporary bulge of possible futures that in itself is harvestable.
The machine that strips your soul bare is called the requintizer. The process is called requintessence.
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Turns out that a lot of the returned from hell worlds are what made the supernatural monsters of yore. Vampires, werewolves, what have you. So the researchers started there. They tracked down a vampire, trapped it, and figured out how to “reverse engineer” its overlays.
This vampire was the oldest of the bunch. He was the Wandering Jew. The guy who tracked him down feels VERY guilty about that now. Could this be Varley?
They needed clones of its cells—the ability to reconstitute and change form and live forever and such occurred in individual cells at a quantum level. Drinking blood was found to be necessary because it provides a new fund of possible worlds in the most economical form. There is a “quantum circulatory system” within all humans that piggybacks on the regular circulatory system. Vampire possibilities quickly decay, and they have no natural “future,” so they have to keep replenishing from humans, who do.
In fact, all the Fused have to do this to some extent. This is why they’re experimenting with growing babies in vats and raising them just to conscious awareness — enormous baby farms — before “harvesting.”
I consulted Abe. He’s well acquainted with Tony’s circumstances. According to Abe, Tony remains a viable “prospect for ascension,” but his prescience comes at a heavy cost. Starting out naïve keeps you from being the special target of hostile gene lines and other predators. Abe confirms that this might be pure fancy and might not. While many incubator worlds for post-humanity are bright and magical, a few are easily this dark and grim.
Far Green Country 