The Crystal Intelligences...

This part of our tale begins in the time described by this earlier
post:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/msg/e693e520f0e4458...l=en&&q
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

As Hermes studied these phenomena, it came to perceive that the key to
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_.