Prior to this mixed blessing, the world held a scant few ‘super-powered’ people. Only a handful more is aware of their existence. Concerted efforts usually kill the subjects that try for a Bruce Banner type of imbuement. A rumor still circulates that the USSR succeeded in animating a nuclear Frankenstein’s monster, but no substantive evidence exists. Genetic manipulation remains a subtle influence until our scientists can study the action of the alien mutagen. With the incorporation of unmanned military vehicles, promising programs finally receive the funding that will ensure appreciable results in a few years. The miniaturization that Iron Man requires though, is still twenty years hence. Only one man on the planet has a technology based improvement on the scale Americans would associate with superheroes. However, he has spent the last year acting as a mercenary for African factions. Were he to volunteer for a major country, he knows that government would incarcerate him in perpetuity. I avoid detailing him because I shall incorporate him into the story and prefer your surprise. In all, since we can not create Doctor Manhattan today, the scientists of a largely similar reality a few years ago can not either.

The great majority are restricted to Green Arrow or Punisher methods for accomplishing their aims. The revolutionaries of every country consider themselves righteous means of change. Some gain prominence for the brutality or caution of their methods. The Weathermen of the seventies represent a villainous version of mundanes effecting a force driven change (removing troops from Vietnam in 1972, a year earlier than here). In this fiction, the Boondock Saints was not a movie; two vigilantes really did conduct an assassination campaign against the Boston mafia. One began to operate shortly before the Cambria entered our system, but again I must protect his identity.

The occult offers the only undemocratic means to personal power. Despite this, almost all magicians have been as ineffective and fraudulent as in the real world. Effective magic requires more energy than a single soul can devote. Only years of meditation allows the student to partition his or her soul for exploitation. The act severely diminishes the psyche and has seldom been attempted. Despite this, a few are born every year with latent psychic ability. If two trained telepaths are in sensory deprivation a few feet from each other, they can transmit faint thoughts to one another thirty percent of the time. Psychic potence equates to van der Waals force fielding against normal covalent bonding. Gunpowder and radio remain simpler and cheaper except in extreme cases.

To become an extreme case, a person must possess more than one soul. The folk tales of vampires and witches suggest hostile takeover is viable but none detail a method. Only human souls are available for the experimenter. Ashley Sachar, a Charles Manson biographer, sacrificed her reputation when she claimed that his terrible mesmerism may have arisen from such a technique. Spirits exist askew to Maya, but breaching the divide requires great force. Demonologists point to this as source of the Russian monster: a demon may have crossed into our universe as a fusion explosion weakened the divide.

As now, no one has a strong opinion about how empowered people affect the world. The most powerful man in the world is one of a group of nine known as the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China (the American President is rather more constrained).

I have no intention to explain the mutagen or its means of effect. It acts solely as Handwavium. I will temper its effects though. I early decided to really restrict its power bestowal. No one will use this to transmute elements or control the weather. At best, a fire controller can direct the fire’s path around a room and keep it from spreading. Maybe many years of training and adept gene therapy will allow for Liz Sherman level generation and control. The international community will overestimate the impact of these individual changes. Unfortunately, a handgun will still imbue an owner with more power and versatility except in special circumstances. The fire controller can shut off a gasoline engine. You can imagine how often a semi-safe situation like that comes up.

Whilst the effects on humans are most interesting, the flora and fauna soaked up much more. Plants can grow better, become hardier, and survive in harsher conditions and more as consequence. I wonder though if some will be maladaptive changes by the realities of biology. If a flower changes color so bees can not see its distinctive marks any more or if previously edible fruit became poisonous, that plant’s pollen or seed dispersal become severely hampered. In fact, this arena becomes the first to test the viability of progeny. I am somewhat inclined to go the route of the mule: viable mixed progeny that is sterile.

Animals introduce more fun into the equation, and potential suffering. I had never thought so but here I can make King Kong or Godzilla. Granted, they would never reach that size but a ‘monster’ epidemic in Mexico is not out of the question with so many overland exposures. (This balances out its bumper crop of Talents.) Wolves, turtles, birds, lizards, and rodents all live outdoors. I grant that my apocalyptic daydream is again conflating the numerous strike zones into a full country bath, which it will not be.

A great variety of slag falls on the Earth in this period. The danger is much like when the Columbia disintegrated above Texas. No one really wants to be outside with twenty-four hour meteor showers going on. Most material did not survive reentry. Unfortunately, the mass of influx exceeded the easy dispersal capacity of our winds. All countries suffered ashy weather for a time. California readers can recall the discomfort and ubiquity of the ash from the fire of 2003. Larger objects survived, some even remained intact (hull fragments). Dredging will recover some ‘useful’ artifacts, toothbrush and battery analogs. The possibly intact technologies remain in orbit, a double flash fry stint proved too much for desired hand cannons or medical equipment.

Despite the sturm und drang of the ejecta, people ventured outside. They had to do all we did during those fires. The drifts built up but a day’s fall could be as little as a centimeter. I daresay, rare couples even got a thrill from doing it outside in alien soot (coprophiliacs?). But farmers swept family fields, soldiers trained, and students rushed in between classes. In retrospect, Mexican agricultural orientation amongst indigenous people accounted for its high rates of exposure.

Hidden in the haystack of filth, canisters barely survived the descent and often spilled and vaporized a mutagenic suspension. (Let’s ignore that the liquid would scald after the tube warmed at terminal velocity.) Only much later, after the period of orbital recovery, did anyone have samples to study. The physical empowerment of its victims spoke clearly enough for the initial period.

Writing so brief an account feels strange. I could write fifteen pages of all my planned backstory, but I would collapse long before then. I see these posts last the perfect length to come home and type shortly before going to bed, whilst ensuring enough depth that they inspire other areas. (I see apocalyptic movements/cults from these conditions but hadn’t yet realized it.)

To understand the scope of the Mutagen phenomenon, you need to know its distribution. (I was going to flog Heroes and X-Men for putting them too close together. Really, I have never read any Uncanny X-Men, so I can’t really.) While I assumed a large amount of mutagen would survive the Cambrian’s destruction, I assumed its worldwide amount on humans would be very small. The oceans swallow most debris of any type and people only sparsely populate continental interiors. I absolutely forbade myself the ease of throwing a ton on America and pretending that only warped shrapnel rained on the rest of the world. Granted, everyone receives a light dusting of steel hail. I decided only two passes offered a beneficial meteor (to statistically balance the absence of maladaptive mutations). Any more and I would need to call the craft a trash barge rather than a seed ship.

The first canisters do drop on California, where I set her story. A few fell on the rest of the southwest, but the fog descends on Central America primarily. Mexico has the most confirmed exposures in the world, followed by Venezuela. This has to do with geometry and expedience. If I dip below CA, I hit the DF. If I want to give an antagonist country a mutant corps, a line from mid-Caribbean to Venezuela keeps it exclusive. Even in gifting mostly not America, I needed to drop at least another opposite region. Eurasia is pretty bad for this. Planting on Europe means hitting four countries at once that have historically been in the best position anyway. Indonesia struck me as best. I probably will not have anyone come all the way from there but it is there for reference.

I just read the Websnark retrospective of Dungeons and Dragons Tiny Adventures. Apparently, Wizards of the Coast made a Facebook application that gave mini reports of how a character fared during a quest. There are communal (virtuous circle) embellishments that doomed the game to a Sisyphusian load that do not interest me. The prospect of a paragraph-long serial struck a chord within me. I am now employing the technique daily to maintain my focus on Psi Chi Analysis. I felt peril within me today: boredom with the story. The feeling actually stemmed from boredom with the intractable plot elements I must resolve. As soon as I return to the parts that I like most strongly, this evaporates. To this end, I will give brief summaries about the external events that have no immediate bearing on the story.

I plan to depict three time periods. The earliest deals with how the protagonist capitalized on helping friends into a therapy career for people with Powers. This will be an alternate 2007, one year after the event that introduces an X-Men type ‘epidemic’ onto some of the world’s population. Another civilization exists in the Milky Way, a colonizing society. One of its – relatively – slow boat seed ships passed through the solar system perpendicular to the plane. Despite this precaution, it struck an artificial satellite at .3c and ruptured. The debris cloud formed close enough to the Earth and Moon that some fell into orbit around each. Some fell into our atmosphere and burnt up. However, shielded canisters of a mutagenic substance survived and released into the environment.

Before this time, fewer than twenty people worldwide acquired enough power to be what we recognize as superheroes and supervillains. Because of the mutagenic bombardment, the number swelled to several, possibly ten, thousand people. In this sense I mean the phenomenon is like the X-Men. The next set of stories detail events between five and ten years after the explosion. At that point, national governments have recovered some of the wreckage of the vessel and have begun to reverse engineer some of the alien technology. The international hierarchy changes to reflect the distribution of Powered populations and salvaging ability.

The frame story, latest in this timeline, occurs five or ten years after the second crop. The world has integrated all the recoverable technologies and the political equilibrium matured. Except, the aliens investigating the lost ship arrive and all attempt to convince them we did not deliberately destroy it. This period is the least defined in my mind, since I have not projected the consequences that far yet.

Henceforth, I will build a probable narrative of the unfolding global drama in the wake of such a boon.

Psi Chi Analysis

Again I avoid writing about the ComiCon. Instead, I have far more exciting news. I am planning out a comic depicting a therapist to superheroes with a caveat I will not reveal. I am glad to construct a space where I can air my dissatisfaction with some types of characters and create homages to those I like. I promise myself to realize it at least an (hour?) every day until I either finish or grow tired of it. In my experience though, neglecting the work or at least not researching for it breeds the contempt of boredom. This makes sense in retrospect: without activating a particular creative concept for expansion from internal or external sources, the corollary ideas dry up. I repeat the same favored aspects until they are the sum of what I remember and insufficient to support a story.

Not this time. I know the steps I must complete to proceed. The format is semi-episodic, each episode blends two cases the therapist undertook in that period. Further, I employ a frame story around each, so these are anecdotes the protagonist tells her apprentice. The shorter elements are the real change for me. In the past, I have given myself over to creating plans for novel length treatments of the ideas I create. Occasionally, I thought of one limited enough for short story treatment but saw unending space stretching behind.

Now, I can see the truth Mckee identifies, in Story, when he asserts that restricting the scope of a story simplifies but enriches the telling. I sense this in the ease of creating the anecdotes rather than the frame story. I can base each around a simple idea, like “an invulnerable person can’t feel anything finer than an RPG.” This needs an invulnerability, a psyche before and after sensory deprivation, and her recommendation.

In contrast, the frame story demands I project out the consequences of the rise in powered beings, the market status, intergovernmental relations, the extended border of scientific understanding and engineered derivations of the change, and many more aspects that posit the decisions of millions of people over the course of ten or twenty years. Further, this aspect fails to inspire because it solely acts to explain those consequences. I consider showing part of a case around each anecdote but do not feel like making it thematically related to the other two. When an episode of Grey’s Anatomy depicts four patients that help the cast deal with death or superstition, it wounds my suspension of disbelief. The form I chose avoids improbable relation since the therapist chooses which stories to relate, but the technique sours my mouth anyway. I mostly avoid thinking about the frame story.

Nonetheless, it is one of the elements I must still roughly create. I do not know who Vivian, the therapist, was before her change, nor who she became afterward. Her solution to a Romeo & Juliet type problem also sits in obscurity. Though I know how to pay homage to My Name is Earl, the base offense waits until I understand Vivian more.

Once I decide how those unfold, I will further detail the individual episodes. At the moment, I know the basic conflicts the invulnerable person will present and her suggestions to him. Next, I must brainstorm how he meets her, the general information exchanged in the uncovery phase, his reaction to her suggestion, and what she has to do to convince him of her seriousness. I repeat this for all the tales. Concurrently, I shall design the costumes for the heroes and Vivian’s face. The setting does not trouble me since I shall limit locales to those I have visited. Penultimately, I will make a script and ask family and friends to rate the emotional plausibility of the work. I elected sensational solutions to the difficulties the powers present her with. I finish by drawing the comic and probably posting the results on deviantart.

Children of Men

This is an average film. If you see the trailer, you know (almost) everything that will happen in the movie. If you see V for Vendetta or read 1984, you will be better entertained. Alfonso Cuarón chose a dystopia and gave it a novel reason: universal infertility. He does not explain the phenomenon nor why it suddenly ends in the person of Ki, an illegal alien. That is the only aspect the trailer withholds. Apparently, the UK adopted siege mentality in the face of angsty violence on all sides.

Now you have all the information to project the entire story. Depressed male shares the common cynicism about the future. He has an upbeat elder friend, but more importantly, divorced from the leader of the resistance. They found a pregnant woman. They try to drive her to scientists to figure out why her fetus came to term. But the resistance is just as corrupt as the xenophobes in blue, so our anti-hero strikes out alone. Eventually, he gets into the ghetto for deportees to smuggle the mother to the nearby pickup zone. The end is left as an exercise for the reader.

In the supplementary material, he tells us the background is the most important. Without it this is just a road movie. The setting crew built compelling sets. It is bombed out Kosovo, Stalingrad. The crew shot for archetypal and got generic, which is the fault of the story. I have read the classic dystopian stories and am unimpressed. I recently played half way through Half-Life 2, so maybe my expectations are too high for the moment. I could be overexposed. I think not. The situation teaches nothing new. The plague comes mysteriously and is cured mysteriously. Society plays Russian Roulette until it sees the second coming, whence all fall to their knees. The hero’s journey always promised to break his ennui. The problem stems from the lack of tension independent of immediate threats to the main characters. I feared/hoped someone would find out she became pregnant and shoot the fetus, ostensibly to save it from pain of still birth or from jealousy.

Another aspect that bothered me was the special features. I always hope the DVD includes a commentary track. Instead, the crew filmed two “documentaries” critically analyzing Children of Men and Cuarón’s body of work. He hired four “philosopher and historian” professors to reveal the marvelous symbolism of the movie I just watched. Make no mistake, these talking heads know their craft. I nodded my head as one explained the propriety of making an escape by boat, a rootless vessel with no connection to the past. That way, the society could be made entirely anew. I like understanding a work from a deeper perspective, but to make it the centerpiece of the special features felt like so much self-congratulations. The others were normal plaudits for the team: how we made the digital baby, how we made the battle scenes (which had great believability).

If you like number conclusions, it is 65/100. I do not regret seeing Children of Men, but will never again.

I have just finished reading Greg Egan’s Diaspora. I began yesterday and probably spent eleven hours in total. I am glad (and not) that I do not often have the opportunity to tap into this portion of my addictive Aspect. Consuming some author’s books initiates Flow in me. Time hides in a corner and my consciousness activates the second layer of my sight with Embodied Novel on screen. I allow it too much influence over how long I spend reading. If I have homework responsibilities, I have historically ignored them in favor of Jasper Fford’s Well of Lost Plots. Last night I did not, but it hurt so good nonetheless. (Microsoft Word does not recognize the phrase “hurt so good” and suggests well, as though that makes any more sense.) Instead sleep debt entered the ring against my hedonism.

I work on second shift. At the Anaheim Convention Center, this means from 5.45 am until 1.45 pm. So, on weekends, I have to set my alarm for 4.30 am. Realistically, I ought to go to sleep at 7.00 pm each night before (nine hours of dream potential), but that is a big inconvenience. My family eats dinner then, so I would need to cook separately for myself at 6.00. Instead, I just suck up the sleep debt and buy it back mid-week. I have kept this lifestyle for two years or so and am no stranger to the insomnia hangover.

Last night particularly sucked. Normally, a straight fight between an activity and sleepiness always sees my task triumphant. Not only am I focused, I am looking directly at a (muted) light source: my computer in a comfortable position. Despite the strongest drive to continue, reading a novel or any other print material involves serious disadvantage. The page only reflects light, requiring a close light source. Often, the bulb restricts the number of comfortable positions by shining in my eyes or my arm/head casts unwanted shadows. Further, I allow my posture to suffer more than when I use my computer.

Because my parents bought me a laptop to take to the university rather than a desktop, I sensitized to the waste heat of its fan. In looking for a laptop stand, I found the suggestion to lift the back slightly with two corks. The fan revealed the consequence of not supporting the center, by vibrating and eventually scraping its casing. When other problems occasioned a total replacement, I considered a laptop stand an unquestionably necessary accessory. (This is rather important since the laptop’s expense occasioned paying in installments and a moratorium on new purchases until September.) At first, I considered only two factors: aesthetics and a low height. I wavered over whether to buy an ergonomic keyboard or not. Finding a low stand would allow me to still use the included keys and save money – speed the day I can buy new dust collectors. Also, I thought a high setting extravagant and unstable. Halfway I realized I had little freedom to choose. I bought a laptop with a seventeen inch screen that weighs eight pounds. My favorite can not support such girth. Many of the others either could not or omitted tolerances, which I nixed in caution. Luckily, Visidec sells the stand I bought rated for my purchase.

(Un)fortunately, the design meant that the lowest setting was most unstable for the support bar. I bought Kinesis’ Maxim keyboard and raised it to the highest (second most stable) height. I am very glad for the constrained choices because my screen is eye height. I needn’t slouch to look at it squarely, nor look down my nose. (Only my chair bothers me for being too short and not supporting my head.) My computer using experience is about optimal in preserving good posture.

Reading, on the other hand is a nightmare in this sense. I have very few ways to keep a book at eye level and all are posturally bad anyway. I can hold up the heavy book. Besides tiring my arms, I sweat where my upper and lower arm touch. I can lie on my back and lift it above my face. If I extend them all the way, the text becomes too small. I can lie on my side and rest the book on the floor/bed. Reading the next page is a hassle. I must either turn onto my other side or support the book on the thin side of its cover, casting shade on the page. I can lie face down off the edge of my bed or grouped chairs. This wears out my neck muscles suspending my nine pound cranium (I checked).

If I give in to gravity, I have to bend my head forward and look down. This slightly thrusts my pelvis forward, further imperiling my lumbar support. I avoid reading (or using my laptop) from my lap. Instinctually, I compensate by bending one leg and using it as a column. This is the worst since I am mostly fetal position, but my other leg is out ninety degrees which means my pelvis is in and slanted to the side. Either puts my weight on too few bone pressure points besides compacting my spine asymmetrically. I fare worst at work when I operate the elevator and can not lie down.

In that case, I usually search for an empty box to prop up the script, but this is a poor substitute for what I really need: a book holder. The optimal form would be an ugly profusion of articulated vises and telescoping legs. Annoyingly, commercial designs center on holding the pages out flat with either strips of metal or little bars. While pressing the pages flat makes the face easy to see, the binding strains from the pressure. After a time, the pages bend out and paperbacks flare to twice their volume like a playing card flower. Hardcovers resist this but the glue holding the paper to the cardboard loosens. To avoid this, I open the book to only 90°, though it means I must turn it to face me and the light. The simplistic model can not adjust to mass market paperbacks, magazines, coffee table books, and 700 page textbooks. Only groups of vises that extend and adopt different angles can accommodate them all. Further, most manufacturers limit the use to a table, which is rather useless to me. (I recognize cookbooks slip past my objection.) If the legs had full freedom in motion, I could lie under it or use it whilst sitting in a chair apart from a table.

I had thought I was going to talk about Diaspora. I guess I care more about this.