ADDENDUM
The addendum is the place where we as authors get to roll up our sleeves up and talk about the technical pieces of the story you’ve just read. When you have an author with a strong science background cowriting with an author who has a strong background in ancient history, you can imagine you might get a story with a bit of both.
And that would be true with Time Trials.
Even though this tale fits squarely in the realm of fantasy, or at least it is most certainly fantasy adjacent, we started it in a very mundane, non-fantasy way. After all, we believe that readers who would enjoy this tale would be anyone who enjoys an action-packed story of the unknown. So that’s how we started it.
Even though this story is not at all related to an old series that some readers may be familiar with, The Twilight Zone, that show was a good example of a series that told tales that inevitably skirted across genres and you never knew what was about to happen. The only guarantee you had would be that you’d be entertained and to expect the unexpected.
That’s what we’re striving for in this series.
We are mixing elements of traditional fantasy, alternate history, and even science fiction or technothriller, with the goal of providing the reader maximal entertainment.
In this tale, we’ve aimed to maintain some level of historic and technical accuracy for many of the story elements.
This addendum will contain a few items that we didn’t have time within the story to elaborate on, and even though they may seem like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, they may not be. Some things that you’ve read fit squarely into science fact or historical truth, and we picked a few topics to at least give you a little insight into some of the things that are real, or are based on real science or history.
Ultimately, the goal of any good story is to entertain, but we tend to believe that the best stories leave you with a question that you ask yourself:
Could that have really happened?
The answer to that question we leave to the reader’s imagination.
We both hope you enjoyed the story, and there’s much more to come.
Brane Cosmology:
Brane? What in the world is a brane? Is this some weird misspelling and you meant to talk about zombie food?
Well, this is where the science part gets weird. Just as a review, the word brane was mentioned a few times by the mysterious Administrator.
The Administrator felt the ripple in the fabric of space itself, well before the hive reached out to alert him.
“We have a primary test triggering malfunction.”
The Administrator frowned. “Give me its local description.”
For the Administrator, the time it took for the hive to process the request and return an answer seemed like an eternity. But for those living within the brane, a thin membrane-like universe in which the test had been triggered, the processing time would have seemed like an instant.
Also it was mentioned at the very end of the book:
“Next test entry retrieved from the queue. Brane select is sigma+654PWJZBE. Relative time is 252 B.C.E.”
These passages may have seemed pretty obscure, because let’s face it—unless you’re a super nerd like one of us, brane cosmology isn’t part of the normal person’s lexicon. Given that, let’s talk about what a brane actually is and how it applies to this story.
I’ll define brane twice. First I’ll speak in “science” terms, all of which you’ll be able to look up if you like, then I’ll explain it in layman’s terms and it’ll be much clearer why I referenced this in the story.
The central idea behind brane cosmology is that the visible, three-dimensional universe is restricted to a brane inside a higher-dimensional space, called the “bulk” (also known as “hyperspace”).
If the additional dimensions are compact, then the observed universe contains the extra dimension, and then no reference to the bulk is appropriate. In the bulk model, at least some of the extra dimensions are extensive (possibly infinite), and other branes may be moving through this bulk.
Interactions with the bulk, and possibly with other branes, can influence our brane and thus introduce effects not seen in more standard cosmological models.
This can also explain why we see the “dark” influences at the galactic level for expansion being faster than expected for the known mass in the universe—in other words, it can be the influence of another universe in one of the n-dimensions that’s causing the faster than expected expansion of our universe.
Okay, most of you are probably saying, “Those were all English words, but I don’t know what in the world you’re talking about.”
Let me further explain:
Imagine our entire universe has three dimensions. Front to back. Side to side. Up and down. Those are all easy concepts to grasp. In the science nerd community, we often refer to the fourth dimension being time, and that’s where the term space-time comes from, which you may have heard of before.
Okay, now let’s zoom out from our universe and imagine it’s all sort of a flat pancake. A membrane of sorts (thus the term “brane” cosmology). The idea being described here is very complex, but at its most coarse level, imagine there are many other pancakes that exist. An infinite number, potentially. Each of those is a universe unto itself floating around in a bigger soup the scientists call the bulk—but for this explanation, let’s suffice it to say that these branes are big flat objects floating in a soup next to each other.
Now the weird thing is, these branes, our universe being one of them, may be no more than a hairbreadth apart from one another. And yet, we cannot see or touch them from within our universe.
Admittedly this is freaky science, and without going too deep, it’s totally speculative at this moment, but it’s real science. Theoretical physicists and others are actually doing research on this topic and studying the various possibilities associated with the concepts that unfold from it. From such studies come breakthroughs. You never know what may come.
And without complicating the explanation too much, let’s just say that each universe, or brane, has their own relative concept of time. Some of you may have heard of the multiverse. It’s a concept where almost anything that could have happened has happened in another copy of our universe. That’s complementary to the concept of brane cosmology. In fact, if you had a machine that could transmit you from one brane to another, you could pick a brane that was in the past, the future, the same time, and had any number of permutations built into it.
It’s hard to imagine this is all science, but it is.
It wouldn’t be the first time today’s science fiction becomes tomorrow’s science fact.
You want an example?
I’m so glad you asked, because here’s a nerdy example that I enjoy tossing out: everyone hopefully remembers that in Star Trek IV, Scotty was talking about needing transparent aluminum for building some water tanks to hold two humpback whales. No? Well, that was mentioned back then, and it sounded cool, but there was no such thing.
Fast forward to today and we have aluminum oxynitride, which is a ceramic composed of aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen. Oh, and it’s clear.
There’s plenty more examples of that sort of thing, but that’s the fun one that may be in some reader’s pop culture arsenal that I hope would be appreciated.
Aliens? And what’s up with their bodies dissolving?
Throughout the story you saw various creatures from the Egyptian pantheon appear. Whether it was the jackal-headed Sethians, the cow-headed Hathiru, or the cat-headed Bastites, they all seemed to have one key thing in common: when killed, their bodies dissolved.
Before we get too deep into the body dissolving, let’s talk about where these things came from.
It was Narmer who said, “The Builders were a greater people. They came down from heaven in mighty vessels. They were tall as giraffes and they had breath like storm winds . . . The Children of Seth were some of their servants and their creation . . . The Children of Bast and the Children of Hathor were also their servants, and there are others.”
Of course, the implication is that there were people who came from elsewhere and created these creatures, and it would be reasonable to assert that these so-called Builders that created these creatures were extraterrestrials of one kind or another.
Let’s talk about the science of such a thing. Do aliens even exist?
Honestly, nobody knows for certain, but if you ask most scientists, they’ll say that they almost certainly do.
Why?
It’s actually a game of numbers. When you don’t know something, you try to predict the outcome of any question by using the data you have at your disposal. Sometimes you can derive a definitive answer based on the information you have, or more often than not, you can make an educated guess about what the answer might be. We obviously don’t know if there are aliens, but could there be? What are the chances?
As it turns out, there was an astrophysicist named Frank Drake who went through this mental exercise. He’s now famously known for the Drake Equation, which was used to at least start the dialog of approximating how many communicative civilizations exist in our galaxy.
How does it work? It’s actually very simple, and the results are fascinating. However, for purposes of brevity, I’ll skip the details of the equation and simply give you the answer—those of you who want more information can of course simply look up Drake’s Equation and enjoy.
Using such an equation, the accepted estimate from low to high is hugely varied, but it’s almost certainly greater than one, meaning there’s probably someone out there. And with some of the accepted estimates plugged into the equation, there are those who believe there might be millions of communicative civilizations just in our galaxy.
Considering that there’s an estimated two hundred billion galaxies in the universe, I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether you believe life exists.
So, the idea that aliens exist isn’t that out of the mainstream nowadays.
And if we presume aliens exist, and could have even visited, that’s not just a modern phenomenon. It’s a phenomenon that could have happened eons ago or even in our recent history.
Imagine if the Builders were just such a species of alien. And they took inspiration from the land and the creatures they saw, and created new creatures.
Creatures that ended up in the pantheon of many civilizations, including the ancient Egyptians.
The natural retort might be, “We’d have hard evidence if they really existed.”
Well, we have lots of pictorial evidence of some rather strange creatures. There are also many written records to corroborate what the pictures show. That’s still hard to believe, right? Where’s the bodies?
What if those creatures were built with a different physiology? Maybe their internals were driven by a different set of chemicals than we’re used to seeing in everyday animals. What if the internals of such creatures, when exposed to air, would dissolve into a gas or a liquid and vanish, leaving nothing for the archaeologists that might look for them thousands of years later?
There are many examples of strange creatures on Earth that resemble nothing most people are familiar with. One simply needs to look at thermophiles or extremophiles to see just how varied life can be, even on this planet.
Some life-forms on this planet will die if exposed to oxygen. Others survive only at temperatures above 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Some require strong acidic environments to survive, while others require environmental pressures of higher than 7,500 pounds per square inch.
With our Egyptian creatures, imagine their chemical makeup is exotic. Not an unheard-of thing. I’d wager that many of you have example of just such an exotic chemical. Mothballs are a classic example.
Yes, the lowly mothball is a perfect example of a chemical that is normally solid, but when exposed to air, over time it turns directly into a gas.
I leave you with these thoughts: Imagine that the things we know are mythology might actually be based on real things that no longer exist. And that the only evidence we have of such things are images and stories. What if they did exist? Again, an exercise for the reader to contemplate.
Wait, how do they know they’re in ancient times? What’s this about the Zodiac?
So we think of the stars as basically being fixed into place, from the point of view of us Earth-bound observers. In fact, that’s where the word “planet” actually comes from—in Greek, the planets are the “wanderers,” which means that the stars basically all move in a fixed relationship to each other, and the planets are the wanderers that don’t stay in one place.
All this, of course, as observed from Earth.
Fun fact: the original seven planets were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. Earth wasn’t a planet, it was the world we lived on. And we couldn’t see Neptune and Pluto at all. And the Sun and the Moon “wandered” along the same path through the sky as Mars and Jupiter and the others, which made them planets, too.
We call that path the Ecliptic, and there are twelve famous constellations on the Ecliptic, called the Zodiac. (Fun fact: there’s a thirteenth constellation on the Ecliptic, called Ophiuchus. He’s a giant carrying a snake, and we cut him right out of the Zodiac, the poor shmuck.) So the seven visible planets chug along this Ecliptic at different speeds, sometimes lining up and sometimes lapping one another.
For our purposes right now, the interesting planet (heh, heh) is the Sun. It takes about a month to cross the thirty degrees assigned to each Zodiac sign. Now, in reality, some signs are tiny, like Cancer, and some are enormous, like Virgo, but for this purpose, we divide the 360 degrees of the Ecliptic into twelve Zodiac signs, and say that each sign covers thirty degrees.
You all know this because at parties on TV shows (though not so often in real life parties, in my experience), people ask each other, when they’re getting acquainted, “What’s your sign?” And what they mean is, “When you were born, where in the Ecliptic was the Sun?”
And D.J. Butler tells those people that he’s a Taurus, and they know that he was born between April 21 and May 20, because that’s the month in which the Sun is in Taurus. And on the spring equinox, which is to say, March 21, the day in the spring when the day and night are equal length, the Sun is right on the edge of Pisces and Aquarius.
But if you could rewind a map of the sky over the centuries, checking in only on the spring equinox, you would see the sun slowly backing its way across Pisces. About 2,200 years ago, at the time of the equinox, the sun was on the border of Aries and Pisces.
And about 2,200 years before that, the sun was on the border of Taurus and Aries.
This movement, this slow backing of the sun across the Zodiac, is called the “precession of the equinoxes.” We’ve known about it at least since the time of the second-century B.C.E. astronomer Hipparchus, but there is some evidence that humans have been aware of it much longer than that.
So when Lowanna Lancaster believes that she’s close to the spring equinox, and the sun is not in Pisces but in Taurus . . . she realizes that she’s not in (chronological) Kansas, anymore.
Is Narmer real?
Probably Narmer was a real person, who lived around 3100 B.C.E. Probably he was a king of Upper Egypt (the south, the desert) who unified Egypt, the “Two Lands,” by conquering Lower Egypt (the north, the Nile delta, the marshes). Probably he was called Narmer in some sources and Menes in others.
What we can say for certain is that there is a stone object called the Narmer Palette. You can easily find images online, so go check it out. The Narmer Palette shows a man wearing the white hedjet-crown of Upper Egypt, personally subduing enemies with a mace. That crowned man seems to be identified as n’r mr, probably meaning something like “fierce catfish” or “stinging catfish.” We pronounce that identification “Narmer,” and we treat it as a personal name. In the palette, he’s a giant, bigger than his enemies, and the victory belongs to him.
So even if we ultimately conclude that Narmer is a legend, Narmer is associated right at the beginning of the Egyptian written record with an idea that would last right through Egypt’s history and even, in some forms, down into the modern age. That idea is the ideology of kingship: it’s the king who counts, the king is the nation, it’s the king who wins the victories. In Egyptian art, that meant that the king was always a conquering giant and his enemies were always tiny. That’s what the Narmer Palette shows, for instance. For another famous example, look up the Kadesh inscriptions online. Ramses II seems to have fought the Hittite enemy more or less to a draw in real life, but in the pictorial accounts, Ramses is a giant who personally shot or trampled the Hittite army.
This ideology, by the way, lies ultimately at the root of the game of chess. The game is over when the king is dead, and not before, because the game is a personal battle between two kings.
So we incorporated Narmer into this story, because it’s a fun conceit to have our heroes enabling the beginning of Egyptian civilization as we know it. And we also built a lot of the storyline around the ideology of kingship, including Marty’s discomfort at the idea that people see him as a king, the personal guarantor of victory, and his genuine relief when he realizes that his side has a king, and it isn’t Marty.
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