Alternative Worlds

Eleanor Maxwell was one of the first people to live long enough to live forever. She had amazing experiences as a human, in substrate, and later on Hareven, a planet forty-nine light-years from Earth. Eleanor Anne Maxwell watched the Tsar Bomba flash on a black-and-white television at fourteen and decided to spend her life understanding the universe well enough to keep it from blowing up. She got the doctorate. She held the long quiet professional line for forty years. At seventy-nine she was laid off, and on the train home she met the loading-dock supervisor who became her husband. And then the future arrived in waves. Longevity escape velocity in 2036, brain-computer interface in 2042, and transition of her consciousness to a computer substrate in 2072: Eleanor shed her biological body and woke up in a digital one, with a hundred and five senses instead of the original five. In 2096 the dimensional breakthrough opened the variant Earths — alternate histories where Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, and Lucifer turn out to be ordinary people in extraordinary roles. Humanity deepens its relationship with the Lonai of Hareven — the first species we ever made contact with, in 1961, the central figures of the events told in Alderamin IV — and meets the first of the twenty-five intelligent species that share its two-hundred-light-year neighborhood. Eleanor is at the center of all of it: the Lonai diplomatic channel, the fractal modes, the named-figures expedition team. She survives a dimensional crash that leaves her substrate community reeling for a decade. She falls in love with Tomas, a consciousness from a fractal universe who cannot tolerate non-fractal Earth and ultimately leaves her. And in November 2197, alone for five years, she does the only thing left to do: she broadcasts her own consciousness pattern toward a Lonai receiving facility forty-nine light-years away — to be reassembled in a Lonai body engineered to her specifications, and welcomed by Henrik, the same Lonai cultural officer who narrated Alderamin IV from the other end of the bridge. She wakes up, fifty years later, on the porch of a stone house at the edge of the Salt-Plain Reach. Alternative Worlds is hard science fiction told from inside one human life — the companion volume to Alderamin IV, which tells the Lonai-side of first contact and the buildout of the bridge between two civilizations, and a continuation of the timeline mapped in my non-fiction book The Singularity Roadmap 2026–2116. Read on its own or read alongside the other two and watch the same three centuries close from three different angles.