Talk:The Start of Eternity/15

R. Gohrlay
replies to these comments:


 * "Gohrlay the robot is very much like Gohrlay the human" <-- I agree entirely and I added an explicit statement to that effect at the meta page for characters.


 * "robot Gohrlay carries on with human Gohrlay’s work the way human Gohrlay wanted" <- I agree, but R. Gohrlay has an unexpected surprise awaiting her in her existence as a robot with a positronic brain: she discovers that she has telepathic abilities. I'm not sure if you ever read any of Isaac Asimov's robot novels, but he developed the idea of positronic brains having what he called "mantalic" powers. By making use of telepathy, R. Gohrlay learns important secrets that the human Gohrlay only previously had hints about. So R. Gohrlay is basically the same kind of "person" as the human Gohrlay, but R. Gohrlay discovers new goals that go beyond the past imaginings of the human Gohrlay. Also, there is an additional complication that shapes the behavior of R. Gohrlay: the "Laws of Robotics". These are a small set of "hard wired instincts" that get programmed into R. Gohrlay soon after she is "born".


 * "She understands that if she if she’s caught doing human Gohrlay’s work she’ll be reprogrammed as a dangerous robot or deactivated" <-- Absolutely! In particular, Overseer Doltun and Orbho Anagro are keeping a close eye on the positronic brain project. Lucky for R. Gohrlay, nobody really expects the mind downloading experiment to be a success. After R. Gohrlay is "born", she keeps secret the fact that she has telepathic powers and she keeps secret the fact that her robotic mind has efficiently integrated the positronic circuits that were imprinted with the structure of her earlier biological brain.

However, having said all of the above, I am at the point (in thinking about the plot) where R. Gohrlay must begin to work with Doltun and the other Overseers in order to push the human population of the Moon towards working to develop some important technologies. R. Gohrlay comes to realize that Doltun is not really all that different from her former biological self and that their past conflict was mostly generated by the fact that Doltun was the puppet of Orbho Anagro, who was actually a robotic agent of the Huaoshy.

Sequence of events. As I have things arranged now, the first page section in the opening chapter is really just a "teaser". The death of Gohrlay is shown in a rather mysterious way. The next page section skips ahead in time to show that R. Gohrlay goes on to develop time travel technology. Only much later in the novel does the reader learn the story of what happens to R. Gohrlay during the long time period between the scene in the "tease" and the scene shown in the second page section of the first chapter. Of course, it would be possible to make a more linear narrative. I've played around with a non-linear structure in honor of the non-linear approach taken in Asimov's novel The End of Eternity. However, we can do anything we want...I do not want to make things too tricky for readers. --JWSchmidt 00:16, January 3, 2010 (UTC)