The War of Troy is in full swing. Trojans have been resisting the invaders for nine years. Achilles has just had his fall out with Agamemnon and decided to withdraw from the fighting. Hector is still leading the charges from the city and Odysseus has yet to start on his wooden horse idea. The Gods are benevolently observing everything from Mount Olympos, appeased by the daily sacrifice ...

... but still, all is not as it should be. At least not as it should be according to Homer. It is not that some tiny details do not quite fit the description in Iliad. After all, everyone knows poets tend to spice things up occasionally. It is that, among the warring armies, there are intruders.

They are called scholics, and their task is to observe and record. And not with a parchment and a pen, as would befit the scenery. In fact, they apparently possess technology that we could only dream of. Morphing bracelets to assume the likeness of the warriors they spy on, force fields to protect them from random injuries, perhaps even the ability to teleport at will.

But the scholics themselves do not appear to be thrilled by their task. Reporting to the Muses, who provide their observations to the other Gods of Olympos, they seem more forced laborers than curious explorers.

But let us move on.

A flick of the switch and the War of Troy disappears, a mere television drama for the future population of Earth. People live in what most would call a paradise, all work is handled by servitor robots, there are only constant parties to attend. Nobody falls ill either, for every twenty years, people visit a firmary that keeps their bodies from aging. In fact, an ingenious orbital system will teleport any injured person to the firmary as well. And after their five twenties, people ascend to orbital cities to join their more developed ancestors.

It is only a pity that people are so dumbed down by their carefree lives that none of them remembers Michael York as Logan. Because if they did, they would certainly ask why nobody has ever heard back from those who have ascended ...

Yet another blink of an eye, and we are far away from Earth, orbiting Jupiter near its moons Europa and Io. Exploring and exploiting the depths of space are intelligent robots, evolved from automatons sent out long ago by humans. There has been no contact, or even need for contact, between the humans and the robots for quite some time, but now the robots are disconcerted by unusual physical phenomena they observe near Mars, and decide to investigate.

And how does this all fit together ? Why, read the books and learn :-)