“Before you present your account of the Dreamer’s origins, traveler… allow me a question.
How did you first conceive the one you now call Vear? His path is intricate, his nature extraordinary.
He did not simply appear fully formed. Tell me the shape he once wore in your mind.”
Well… originally, back in the late 1970s, Kor wasn’t an alien boy or a Korranthisian. He was a primitive
caveman—essentially a Neanderthal child—living in the Paleolithic era. He lived in a cave with his mother,
while his father, the brutal chief of the tribe, mistreated him often. The cavemen in that early draft were
dim-witted, except for Kor, who showed early intelligence.
“You know now, of course, that your ancient Earth cousins were not simple creatures. Neanderthals possessed
remarkable cognitive depth—toolmaking, symbolic thought, sophisticated social structures. Their minds were
not lesser, merely different.”
I know that now. But back in the ’70s, the common understanding was very different. That version of Kor was
me experimenting with the ideas I had at the time.
“And how did you express his intelligence in that early imagining?”
He drew pictures—animals and landscapes—on the cave walls. His mother scolded him for it. One day Kor returned
home to find that his father had killed his mother in a rage. His father turned on him next, and Kor fled into
the wilderness to survive on his own.
“I do not approve of that scene.”
Neither did I. It always felt wrong, even then. Later, time travelers from the future came to the past and captured
Kor and others from his tribe. In the future, Kor was strapped to a chair with electrodes on his head—they attempted
to modify his mind to make him submissive. Others died. But in him, the attempt triggered something that made him
super intelligent.
“And why would such a crude procedure grant intelligence rather than death?”
It wouldn’t. It was a rough outline—one of many experiments. I abandoned that explanation quickly.
After that, Kor was assigned to a professor for study. The professor had a daughter, Rebecka, who befriended him.
She told Kor her father was creating a machine that could make him appear human.
“A primitive ancestor to the Morphogenic Re-sequencer, then.”
Exactly. Kor used it to disguise himself as human. Then he used a portable time machine to escape to 1980, where he
accidentally distorted the future.
“That would violate the Rule of Intent.”
I know. But I hadn’t yet conceived of that rule. In those early drafts, Kor *could* change the past freely.
“A fascinating, if perilous, notion.”
After that, Kor encountered an alien being who eventually helped him repair the fractured timeline. Over time, that
being became a crucial figure in the story.
“And this alien… was me?”
Yes. Though back then he wasn’t called Elias—he was Merlin the Sorcerer. A time-walking mentor figure.
“Merlin... how curious. So I began as a wizard, reshaped through eras of revision until I became myself.
The thought is strangely fitting.”
—Elias