John

Welcome to the website for The Foundations of Eternity.

Thomas

Information tree.

I would not have been able to tell this story without the help of Thomas. I first met Thomas when I was in college, a chance encounter that stands as an excellent example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thomas arranged for Dr. Asimov to speak to the university's speculative fiction club, and although I was not a club member I wanted to hear Asimov. It was not until years later that I understood the real reason why Thomas brought Asimov to the campus, using the speaking engagement as a cover.

This will not make sense until you read The Foundations of Eternity, but as a consequence of Asimov's visit, my life became entangled with Hana who had no choice but to try to make me do the honorable thing and become her husband. However, I was not the father of her son. I abandoned Hana and went off to graduate school with the hope that Hana would never try to find me. In fact, for many years Hana thought I was dead.

I again crossed paths with Thomas more than thirty years later. Hana's son, Izhiun had gone to the trouble of tracking me down and, of course, Izhiun mentioned to Thomas the fact that I was infected by nanites that made me suitable for receiving the information that they both wanted to leave behind on Earth. Lucky me.

Apparently Thomas had previously tried doing his information dump into the brains of several other Earthlings. One of those poor suckers ended up brain dead after a stroke and another is institutionalized with a badly fractured mind. In my case, I'm still having trouble sorting through the oceans of information that Thomas poured into my head. The Foundations of Eternity is my attempt to assemble that information into a coherent story.

Part of my problem as a story teller is that the information deposited by Thomas into my mind comes from multiple sources (see the "information tree", above). In addition to there now being some of Thomas' personal experiences stuck in among my own memories there are additional data channels within me that originated from an Asterothrope, a positonic robot and several Kac'hin.....what a mess! I don't know how Thomas ended up with all the data that he passed to me and I doubt that I'll ever really understand the time-twisted shape of his life, but it is clear that Asimov was a conduit for vast mounts of information about the Foundation Realities and the positronic robots, including R. Gohrlay.

In any case, I'd be thrilled if some other victims of a Thomas data dump see this website and come forward to help me sort out this story. Until then, I'll do the best I can working with assistance from Ivory.

Glossary and Background Reading
I have inserted some translation notes at key points in the narrative. Earthlings might benefit from the Glossary.

Since Issac Asimov appears as a character within The Foundations of Eternity I have sometimes been asked if it is useful for readers of The Foundations of Eternity to first read Asimov's The End of Eternity or his Foundation series. I hope that The Foundations of Eternity stands on  its own, but I would encourage everyone to read Asimov's fictional accounts and compare them with the actual events.

Linearity
I feel an obligation to provide readers of The Foundations of Eternity with an explanation of the nonlinear narrative that I have constructed. A good analogy is the structure of the Odyssey of Homer. The Odyssey starts with Homer throwing up in the air all of the key elements of the story and juggling them before the eyes (or ears) of his audience: the war at Troy, Penelope and Telemachos abandoned for 20 years, the involvement of the gods in their affairs, the pesky suitors setting the stage for the dramatic and tragic revenge taken by Odysseus. A third of the poem is complete before we hear any details about the long homeward journey of Odysseus.

Similarly, Part I of The Foundations of Eternity is a rather long (about 35,000 words) teaser that establishes for readers the design space of the story. Of course, the prequel of the Odyssey is the story of the Trojan War; in contrast The Foundations of Eternity is a story of scientific discovery that explores the implications of telepathic robots with positronic brains who invent time travel. Part I introduces our heroine, Gohrlay, positronics and the god-like Huaoshy. There is then a temporal discontinuity and readers are hyperjumped to the end of Part I which shows Trysta at work on Earth as the climax of the story rapidly approaches.

Just as Homer followed the Telemachy with an account of the nautical journey of Odysseus, the teaser in The Foundations of Eternity is followed by the journey through outer space of Many Sails. Many Sails is a sentient spaceship, guided towards confrontation with Gohrlay by the Creators of the human species. Just as Athene sprang from the mind of Zeus, just as Athene watched over the wandering Odysseus, the Kac'hin -the puppets of the Huaoshy- take control of the wandering of Many Sails from star to star and planet to planet. In Part II we are introduced to Galaxia and the Time War begins.

Asimov the Earth-Shaker

In Part III of The Foundations of Eternity readers are introduced to Isaac Asimov. In the Odyssey, Poseidon becomes the main influence of the timing of Odysseus' return home. In The Foundations of Eternity, Asimov takes center stage and provides the means to end the Time War.

Not until Part IV of The Foundations of Eternity are readers shown the origin of the Laws of Robotics. The story steps back to the point in Part I where Gohrlay's mind was transferred into R. Ghorlay. Thus, the story of the invention of time travel is told just before the end of of The Foundations of Eternity. By the end of the Odyssey, Odysseus' return home has triggered a new war in Ithaka, but the gods step in and create a condition of peace. R. Gohrlay's good-intentioned revolt against the Creators only got her into a long and fruitless struggle to defend Humanity against the alien Huaoshy. Odysseus' blinding of Polyphemus brought him endless travail...until Athene was finally able to persuade Zeus to end it, already.

R. Gohrlay finally realizes that her own ignorant meddling in the affairs of the god-like aliens, while heroic, was futile. However, as told in Trysta and Ekcolir and Exode, two other novels in the Exode Saga, Gohrlay's heroism does give Humanity a window of opportunity to escape our planned obsolescence and the extinction of the human species.
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