I've got a new story, and I think you guys will really like it. It's about the small crew of two species (both human, to their surprise and perplexity) aboard their very first, and experimental, Faster-Than-Light starship, using wormholes. I was inspired to do a book on a wormhole drive after seeing an episode of "the Universe" entitled "Cosmic Holes," in which black holes, white holes and wormholes were discussed.
But the big key to this story is defining reality, and what makes us human. In this day and age, humans and these alien humans as well have a series of nanites implanted into their bodies to assist in things like strength, information retrieval and even altering your dreams to where you can lucidly weave a vivid tableau of your choice into an adventure while you sleep. It's about the idea that something may have happened to these peoples and they don't know it, because the nanites have been programmed to either delete or block the memory. But the true background of the story is really underneath all of this: defining God and the afterlife without bias of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.
The concept is called virtuality, and I derived it from the term Virtuality Continuum. The Virtuality Continuum is an anthropologists model that has four categories. In order across the spectrum it goes -- Actual reality, augmented reality, augmented virtuality, virtuality -- meaning that as you move further across the spectrum, you augment more and more virtual aspects into reality as you go, until it's a new universe all together. My idea is complex though, so kind of get comfortable.
- Theory of Virtuality -
Think of our universe as a video game, perhaps Halo. Master Chief and the other soldiers run around, doing their thing: shooting down Covenant ships and killing aliens, because that's all they know. They have a set path that can't be detoured -- ie, playing the game from beginning to end -- and they don't understand how or even realize that there's a greater world beyond their own that has designed everything in their universe. So what if our universe is the same? What if God is like a game designer, and we souls are merely players? And when we die, game over. Of course, I'm not saying God is some geek behind a computer with a degree in CGI rendering, but something much more complex and profound that it shatters our understanding.
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Anyway, that's just the basic premise of it. But the reason these people have a wormhole drive now is because when they both met, Earthlings were what physicists today would call a Type 1 race -- able to completely manipulate their planet in every way, and just branching out into space (which will truly be us in about 2100 A.D.) -- and these other alien humans would be just barely a Type 2 race -- harnessed their planet, out into their own star system, and just barely getting into interstellar travel. After First Contact, the two learned how to communicate and combined their races for centuries to go on. And that's where we begin, with a human of Earth origin, and a human of alien origin, serving on the same crew, have a sort of back-and-forth throughout the novel, discussing this theory of virtuality while the story progresses.
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And while they fly on, eventually they get stranded, but figure out the "Virtuality" that's outside their own universe, and arrive at a planet that is in our Solar System. But here's where it gets a bit "blow your mind"-ish... In the novel, I make sure to never say that either of these people come from planets called Earth or systems like the Solar System. I merely added that here so you guys would have a base to work from.
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Anyway, that's my story. So what do you think? By the way, if anyone's got a better title than Behind Reality, please speak up. Because so far it's either that or the title "Virtuality."
Thanks, everyone!
