My first sweep through The Reader was a bit hurried; I was quite excited, as one might imagine. Here I was, holding a electronic gizmo from the future, reading about exploits the likes of which I’ve never encountered in fiction. The problem was, I read these accounts as if they were just exciting fiction, and that first pass missed something that I’m picking up on now. Just as in real life, there are few good guys and bad guys in Molly’s story. Most everyone falls somewhere in-between.

That’s not to say that some people are more despicable than others, or that some don’t stand above the rest by comparison. It’s just that I have a hard time vilifying some of these people when they make poor ethical decisions. As a future historian, I’m learning to fight my bias in order to create a most-accurate account of events. Doing so is making me re-think these characters, but more importantly… it’s making me re-think my life.

So often I take the easy way out when it comes to judging friends and family. I “skim” through them, looking for a fast solution, categorizing them in a blink, and filing that neat summation away while I return to my own needs. Dealing with one of Molly’s friends challenges this habit. It’s a lesson I wish I’d learned sooner. It also explains why I adore Molly so much.

Despite my attempts to look at all sides of a person’s personality, I’m not an ethical relativist. I believe in Objective Moral Truth. I just don’t think we know what it is, nor will we ever. It’s a limit on a graph, something we approach asymptotically, but never reach. It’s clear to me that some people are closer to that limit and some are farther away. The former deserve our admiration and respect. The latter need our help and our own good example.

Something about Molly makes me tear up just at the sight of her name. Is it my obsession with chronicling her life? Or does it have something to do with the complex nature of good and evil? I think it might be that she’s so breathtakingly high in my ethical esteem, that I feel nervous for her; and I’m in awe of her. Like a trapeze artist teetering on a high, fine line with no net below.

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First, I worked all weekend to create a new website (this one!). Simple and clean with a breathtaking splash that changes as you surf. The focus, as always, will be the content. Molly Fyde, especially. All posts from the old blog will get moved over, and I’ll probably run both concurrently. If you prefer the look of the other site and the Blogger network, you can go there to read. This site will be a general locus for everything I’m working on, not just the Molly books.

The second announcement is almost too crazy to mention. I hesitate to, it’s so outlandish. I’m going on vacation one week from today. With the Bern Seer.

Yeah. I have a funny feeling we aren’t popping down to Mexico for a week of Margaritas and Salsa-dancing. The message came up on The Reader two weeks ago, telling me to be ready to set aside all work for a week and to go someplace “Out of this world.”

Do I not sound excited enough? I have to admit, I’m a bit more nervous and skeptical than anything else. I feel like camera crews are going to capture this all on film and tell me I’ve been on some weird reality-TV show. Or the thin, lovely old lady who gave me The Reader is going to take me back to an apartment full of cats and show me walls of fiction, piles of loose papers, and bookshelves of journals. All of this is just mad scribblings over so many years of “flights of fancy” that she now has frequent flier miles that’ll get us to Mars and back.

Maybe I’m dealing with a rogue genius, a crazy savant, who doesn’t know how to organize this material into something readable. Something that can be understood. Or, perhaps she believes this nonsense. Maybe she has some sort of dissociative personality disorder. I’ve been so committed to this project, but soon I might need to commit its founder.

I haven’t had doubts like these since the first and only time we met. That was also the last time my wife and I had this sort of fight… rose our voices with one another.

If I don’t sound too enthused, or nervous with the prospect of leaving the planet for a week, part of it is ’cause I’m scared I won’t. I’m more terrified to find out I’ve spent six months of my life doing nothing.

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I’ll never forget the day I showed Dr. Lisa Robinson, one of my astronomer friends at NASA, what has since become known as “The Impossible Map.”

We were having lunch together in the cafeteria near KSC HQ (the hub of Kennedy Space Center’s inland industrial area) when I showed her The Reader for the first time.

As I’ve said before, this project drove me batty from the first week, and I think Lisa was worried about her old friend. I was flipping through documents and talking excitedly about what I’d found thus far when I realized that Lisa wasn’t looking at The Reader–she was looking at me.

It’s an unpleasant experience, discovering that your close friends think you’re crazy. Even worse is the difficulty one has in convincing them otherwise, especially when you are desperate to do so. The absolute worst, though, is when their sincere doubts begin to weaken your own resolve.

I was seeing myself through Lisa’s eyes, and that’s when I first starting having major doubts. Her next reaction didn’t help matters. I had finally scrolled to the document I went there to show her. I slid The Reader across the table, urging her to take a look.

Lisa laughed immediately. She covered her mouth and looked up at me, eyes bulging wide. Her eyebrows were arced high, apologizing for not being able to control herself. When she explained why the was “Impossible,” I was humiliated. Keep in mind, I’m a glorified chemical engineer with a physics degree–not an astronomer. However, a grade-schooler could have pointed out the obvious problem with the map I was showing her.

If it was labeled “The Milky Way,” where in the universe was the picture taken from?

Lisa also pointed out that the spiral galaxy in the photo looked uncannily similar to M101. I asked her if these galaxies couldn’t resemble one another, or if there was any way the photo could have been taken…and she said “No.” Then she asked if it would be okay if she called my wife. “To have a chat.”

Before I left, Lisa scanned a copy of the map right off the face of the reader (a technique I never thought of before, and have since used to snag schematics and some other diagrams). She said it would be fun to e-mail it around to her colleagues and stifled another laugh.

I figured the incident was over and promised myself that I would shower and shave before I visited with any more friends about this Molly Fyde nonsense.

The next week, I got a phone call from her. Again, she was telling me that the map was impossible, but this time…she wasn’t laughing. She sounded anxious and harried. I had been asleep (passed out at my computer), but I agreed to rush right over (breaking my earlier promise to myself regarding hygiene and visitations).

“It was Wade that pointed it out,” she told me behind the SSPF building. “He called me and congratulated me on the effort.” Lisa was glancing up at the sky, as if someone were watching. “So I asked him what effort he was talking about, and he said the distances, positions, and luminosity.”

Now I was the one worried for my friend. She looked horrible, and I couldn’t follow a single word of what she was saying. I begged her to slow down and pretend my Day Pass was a Visitor’s Pass.

“The distances are spot-on,” she said. “The luminosities, the angles of deflection. For Menkar, Canopus, and Sol, anyway.”

“What about the others?” I asked.

“Never heard of them,” she said.

A handful of people at NASA already knew about the image and were poring over it. They were calling it “The Impossible Map.” But now the label had become ironic and spooky instead of literal. Everyone wanted to know who had created the hoax. (If you guys are reading this, now you know where Lisa even got the image. Perhaps you want to start taking the hyperspace document more seriously?)

Here’s the map, and I can corroborate the relative distances between these stars by suggesting that they conform to elements within Molly’s narrative. Here is a link to the star data Lisa sent me later that day.

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One of the best tools I have for making sure my telling of Molly’s story is both honest and compelling is, ironically, her Academy records. I have every paper Molly wrote, from Junior Academy book reports to a pre-action tactical assignment she wrote just prior to the Tchung Affair.

Here’s a sample from one of her essays (picking up on the second page). I think it’s a fair representation of her unique mixture of iconoclasm, creative thinking, and human decency.

*************************************

It is clear, therefore, that Dr. Glav Jones has made a grave error in linking societal changes on Delphi IV with first Human contact. His anti-consumption bias, noted above, has him searching for causation where there is mere correlation. Did the arrival of Human envoys to Delphi IV spark a revolution? Undoubtedly. Did Delphi society swing to a consumerist base in ensuing years? Absolutely. Was this, as Dr. Jones suggests, a result of a Human conspiracy? I think the answer is clearly “No.” But without a grasp on the universal rules of Natural Selection, it is impossible for Dr. Jones to see why.

The Galactic Union has now cataloged over 400 planets that harbor life. More than 80 of these planets had some form of sentience. Almost twenty of those were at least in the industrial phase. In every case, the principles of evolutionary natural selection have been verified. The process is now understood to be chemical, as much as it is biological. We would be just as surprised to find a world which wasn’t based on RNA/DNA and the subsequent shortcuts that life stumbles upon, as physicists would be if they discovered a planet on which objects didn’t fall toward the center.

Despite this, xenoologists such as Dr. Jones continue to rely on soft psychological musings of cultural development rather than on the stricter theories which are founded on scientific principles and subjected to the rigors of peer-reviewed publication. The oversight would be tragic, were it not comical. The experts devoted to exploring the condition of all lifeforms do not study the very theories that govern life.

The case of Delphi IV highlights a pattern of sentient behavior seen, not just on other colony worlds, but in the ancient history of Earth. When organisms are given complete freedom, they tend to use that freedom to hoard resources. This is a fact of nature that can be seen in every engorged belly and every stockpile of gathered goods. Evolution rewards the greedy, especially if the organism can make large displays of philanthropy while it is quietly sneaking more away for itself.

Detractors of this theory often point to ecological niches that have attained a balance. This argument is flawed, as that balance has come after a long process of competing claims on resources. Give one of the competitors a bit more room, and see if they forgo the extra calories or territory because they prefer that on which they have already settled. The balance we see comes at the end of a process of each side taking as much as it can, resulting in fast prey and starving predators. If we found a symbiotic relationship wherein the horned grazers provided a steady supply of willing meals to the carnivores that promised to only eat their fill, I would be willing to entertain the argument.

What happened on Delphi IV was that the greedy imbalance between the slave-owners and the enslaved was disturbed. Guided by one of the great principles of the philosopher Madaline Meln, Humans intervened to secure the freedom of a sentient race in bondage. The subsequent flourishing of culture on Delphi IV led to increased societal freedoms and individual wealth. That the participants of this system used this combination to increase their own holdings, and improve the future for their offspring, is not to be condemned–it is to be expected.

There is much that Dr. Jones gets right in his analysis of Delphi IV, but not an ounce of it is based on a rational understanding of the forces at play. The good points he has, and I daresay the only reason the man is read and cited widely, is because his warnings of over-consumption resonate with Humans. Simply because the urge to hoard is rewarded in nature does not mean we ought to reward it in our civilized cultures.

The Delphians can learn from our mistakes, just as they have accepted the universal wrong of slavery. But we need to teach them that these urges they feel to possess as much as possible come from biological imperatives, not from a cultural invasion. Not only is the truth more helpful, it is more palatable. Current mistakes in ideology lead to xenophobia. We look at a universal trend, and tend to blame the first example of that trend as if it is the cause of the trend. This not only ensures that the pattern will continue, it perpetuates the hate that comes from ignorant tribalism.

For these reasons, and others that the space requirements of this assignment will not allow me to enumerate, I am unable to give a breakdown of Dr. Jones’s conclusions regarding the increased consumption of luxury goods on Delphi IV following first contact. His biased assumptions and lack of a chemical or biological education do not just lead to flawed statements on the societal development of Delphians, I believe they make him unqualified to write about any culture in the Milky Way. Period.

*************************************

It is quite a read; and if you made it all the way through–kudos! Imagine sorting through thousands of documents like this on top of the millions of other bits of evidence I have. You’ll understand why my hygiene has suffered.

Just as fascinating as Molly’s ideas are those of her instructor, who gave her a D- for the paper. He corrected the obvious grammatical mistakes (reproduced faithfully, above) and cautioned her against run-on sentences and obtuse word-choices (typical of highschool essays, I’m afraid), but he really nailed her for not following the assignment.

From this last, we get an idea of what Molly went through at the Academy. Frankly, it just makes me love her even more.

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I apologize in advance to my friends at NASA, who are eagerly anticipating the results of my research. Many of them have taken an interest in what I’m doing, but I believe they are going to be surprised to discover something. I know I was.

Molly’s story is about people and relationships, not about gadgets and gizmos. As a geek, (and someone who likely suffers from an autism spectrum disorder) I was confused by the focus of my source material. The vast majority of it recounts conversations, feelings, people and places.

Then, something occurred to me: Would I write the following in my diary?:

5/28/2009 – My wireless personal communicator vibrated to life, sending out a shrill version of a hip-hop song that only sounded decent with the sort of bass impossible with such a small speaker. I grabbed the small device, checking the OLED outer screen that gave me a visual representation of the person calling. It was my wife.

I opened the communicator, admiring the arrangement of a myriad number of buttons. What a marvelous device, capable of snapping pictures that contain over three million individual pixels, store thousands of songs, and even log into the global computer network to pull up maps and satellite photos of any place on the planet.

The power of the small machine was astounding. I pressed it to my ear, all that technology thrumming in the palm of my hand.

“Hello?” I said.

It was my wife. She wanted to make sure we had something to entertain us tonight. An optical video disc that would project high definition images to our flat-screen plasma display. We did, but there was a problem…

…we’d seen them all.

I threw the personal global photographic personal communicator into the small pouch on the front of my leggings and grabbed my keys. Outside, I punched a button on the fob, sending micro-pulses of radio activity to a sensor in my vehicle. It recognized the signal and servos sprung to life, unlocking the doors.

Settling behind the wheel, I cranked the engine of my 1997 Geo Metro and studied the dash. The fuel gauge was low, but I had bigger problems: a danger indicator in the shape of a small combustion engine was flashing. It had been doing this for eight years. Would today be the day? I tried to push the horror out of my mind.

The Geo Metro eased out of my parking hangar and onto the streets. Hundreds of makes and models of enclosed personal transportation devices hummed and zoomed along. Most of them were much larger than my Geo, but all of them contained a single human. I merged with the flow carefully and was swept along like flotsam on a swift current.

One of the many food warehouses loomed on my right, its tall sign supported by a single column of steel and lit up with hundreds of internal LED lamps. I docked my 1997 Geo Metro in an empty space and hurried to the large, squat building.

Sensors anticipated my arrival, my body breaking their unflagging concentration, and two motorized doors swished to either side. I shook my head at the genius of the arrangement. If I had my personal communicator out, and I was sending a textual update to my Facebook page, or composing a 160-word addendum to my Twitter account, I could have done so without pausing to grasp a door handle.

They had thought of everything.

I tried not to get distracted… I was only here for one thing, and thankfully, the large red machine didn’t have a line. My wallet was already out, my personal banking chip sliding out of its housing. For just a moment, I became lost in the mesmerizing hologram stamped on the front. Bank of America. The colors shimmered and danced above the surface. I turned the chip over and noted the dark magnetic strip on the rear. All of my banking info was stored here with thousands of 1’s and 0’s.

The chip slid through the receptacle on the red machine. Flipping through the options, I ruled out anything that I might enjoy. I needed something with two people on the cover, preferably one of each sex. If Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston was the female, there would be bonus points in my wife’s unconscious tally. I found an optical video disc that suited and pressed a button, listening to the whirring and clicking of hundreds of gears as my choice was being delivered by the robotics within…

Ahem. Yeah. See the problem? Nobody writes like this. Except, perhaps, unpublished sci-fi authors. We are all constantly using technology that we do not understand. We don’t know how the stuff is made, the scientific principles of their operation, heck… we don’t even know how to use the majority of its functions. My simple oven is capable of things that I will never use it for.

We live in a world of yesterday’s science fiction–and we don’t even know it. The same is true of Molly Fyde. The story she left behind (or is going to leave behind) is one of emotions, not of science. The fact that it takes place in the future means less than one would think. Just as Homer’s poems speak to me across thousands of years of unchanging human emotions, so does Molly’s adventures, which are just 400 years away.

So, for those of you who want to know how every little gadget in Molly’s time works, you’re not alone. I’m curious as well, and I’m doing my best to uncover what I can. But, the more I learn about Molly and her friends, the less these details bother me for inclusion in my narrative. I’m not going to write this like my sample, above. I’m just going to tell the story, which is primarily about these amazing people and the love and devotion that forms between them.

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I have fans! Who knew?

I would like to thank the two sharp-dressed gentlemen that stopped by this evening. I really wish I could remember what agency you were from, all I recall is your badges looked like tricky Scrabble racks.

I’m extremely honored that you found my blog and took an interest in my story… it’s only been in the public domain for three days! Excellent job in monitoring the airwaves, I must say.

Next time, if you want to come inside, just ask. Really, I mean it. No need to shove a judge’s signature in my face and terrorize my wife, just knock on the door and accept my hospitality.

Speaking of my wife, she would like her first-generation Kindle back. Or buy her one of the new ones. We’re still trying to figure out what you’d want with her collection of vampire novels.

Oh, and best of luck in going through those videocassettes. Like I told you earlier, they are part of a giant prank. Millions of pages of gibberish. Promotional material for a science fiction novel. I would like them back when you are done with them, and yeah, I’m very impressed with the trunk capacity of your Ford LTD, I never thought you’d get them all in there.

So… continue reading along. I’m sure you’ll find what I have to say interesting. Just keep in mind that none of it is real. I promise.

And visit as often as you like–as long as you don’t look on top of the ceiling fan in my office…

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