More about my next book, The Search for the Sevenths, which is also my NaNoWriMo project for November. Instead of focusing on writing the required 50,000 words, I plan to do some writing but mostly to incorporate the research I have gathered for the book. Much of it I still have to read carefully and decide if and how it fits in the story.
If after reading the rest of this preview, anyone interested in what I’m researching and how I plan to use it can contact me through this web site.
The Search for the Sevenths will be a sequel to Saving Grace and A Biot’s Odyssey set about 30 years after the second book.
Ruth Donohue’s final request to the Biots and the Secund robots is to convince humans, Secunds, Dublos and Pozzens to emulate the Beings and accept creatures of artificial intelligence as partners, not a presence to be feared.
Gaopod, the Biot who discovered how to communicate with the creatures of Lavaworld through music, takes up her challenge now that he’s finished creating a 3-D model of the Milky Way that fits inside a specially-designed building the size of several football stadiums. It becomes the ultimate tourist destination. At the same time, he is among the Biots and robots organizing the search for the seventh species in the Milky Way as revealed by the Ancients when Genghis and the others visited the second Dome World.
Robots volunteer to crew the fleet of spacecraft captured during the battle against the mechanical insanity that threated the Secund and Dublo worlds to explore the regions of the galaxy where the Sevenths, as they have been dubbed, might exist. Information from this exploration is incorporated into Gaopod’s model of the Galaxy, making it a dynamic, constantly changing display.
With that search well underway, Gaopod and his team turn their attention to the AI issue only to be confronted by a mysterious virus that threatens the computer based information systems on Earth and Mandela. Trade, banking, transportation and other vital components of the economies of those planets as well as communications with the other worlds, are crippled by the virus. The Beings, Secunds and Dublos are restricting their links with the infected worlds to prevent the spread of the virus. There is a great debate about whether the virus was developed by groups opposed to contact with aliens or whether it was created spontaneously.
The Sevenths are aware of the other species in the galaxy but have avoided revealing their presence because they fear contamination of their planet (got to find a biological reason) from other organic species. When they detect the approach of the robots’ ship, the Sevenths shut everything down to make their world look abandoned. Intrigued by the presence of several seemingly-abandoned cities on the planet, the robots land anyway. They are confronted by the Sevenths whose hostility dissipates when they realize the visitors are mechanical beings and not organics loaded with bacteria that could wipe out the remnants of their once thriving population.
The Biots and robots organize a project to create a communications link with Sevenths and the other planets and undertake to restore much of the equipment left behind on the planet.
Alex Binkley 