Fans of Lois McMaster Bujold know that Miles Naismith is the name used by Miles Vorkosigan when he was off playing Admiral of the Dendarii Mercenaries in her extraordinarily good series of Vor books. Miles is my descendant. I am quite proud of my remote descendant, but you mustn't confuse him with me. You may be interested to know, however, that the Vor stories are quite literally true.
When I was at the Company [ed. note, the CIA], DDI [the intellegence analysis part of the Company] ran a series of "psych experiments" on unsuspecting college students to test a theory that certain psychic talents could be trained, including precognition. Ms. Bujold was in that group, although her memory of it was carefully excised after the experiment. Now even something as straightforward as blind testing of unsuspecting subjects would usually be handled by DDO [covert ops], to whom I reported, but apparently DDI thought foreseeing the future was their bailiwick. The tests were actually successful . . . too successful. Several subjects were found have the actual ability to foresee events, but unfortunately for DDI, only at a temporal distance so great that the information was useless for any practical purpose.
I found out about this shortly after Miles appeared in Ms. Bujold's writing. Noticing the similarity of the unusual name, I was asked to make a family time capsule, to be passed down from generation to generation, ultimately to Cordelia, asking her to perform certain acts which would then show up in Ms Bujold's writing. Cordelia was asked to request that Miles also help. When these acts did show up in later works, we knew that the capsule had reached her, and that Ms Bujold was actually reporting the
future, whether she knows it or not. It is clear this precognition is a major benefit when writing science fiction.
The project was canceled when it was realized that DDI needed no enhanced abilities in order to write science fiction, having developed a very high degree of skill already in their Presidential briefs.
Gender
Male