Author Archives: natechen

Author’s Obligations: The Audience

Posted by natechen on

You do not become an author simply because you want to have a good time. Being an author is a job, and it comes with certain responsibilities. They vary in importance and some of them are more important for fiction or non-fiction authors. But they are there, and if you’re not living up to them then the ugly truth is you are failing as an author. Obviously, it’s important for the aspiring author to know what they are.

If you’ve done any writing at all, you probably have some idea of what these responsibilities are already. Watch your grammar, mind your punctuation and know your story. But the more ways you see them, the more ways you can think of them, the more they will shape your writing and the better your writing will be. So what’s the first, most important duty of the author? Is it to clean, flowing prose? Good grammar and punctuation? No, the first duty of the author is to your audience.

Writing is a part of the art of communication. When you are writing you must be aware of the person or people who are reading, if they cannot understand you then you have failed to communicate. Therefore you must be mindful of your audience if you hope to succeed. Don’t get so caught up in your story that it runs away from you, it’s very unlikely your audience will be able to follow all the places it takes you unless you take the time to carefully mark the path. In short, know your audience.

So, who is your audience?

Well, as contradictory as it may seem, the author’s first audience is themselves. Yes, I’ve just said that it’s important not to get too wrapped up in your own story but, at the same time, the person who has to be most invested in understanding and enjoying your writing must be you. If you don’t buy into what you’re writing 100%, no one else will buy in at all. What’s important is to look at your story through the eyes of the reader. You need to set aside everything you already know about the story you are writing and look at it as if you’d never heard of anything in it before. Learn to put aside your author’s perspective and see if you can enjoy what you’ve written on it’s own merits.

The second audience is the people who share an interest in what you’re writing about. They are your most importance, core audience, they are the ones who will read your story and then want to share it with others. While self editing is the first hurdle for your story, you will need feedback from this part of your audience before you can call your story complete. Can they follow your ideas? Do they enjoy your story? Is there some barrier to understanding that needs to be removed? You can’t evaluate these things yourself, you’re not objective enough nor do you really count as a large enough sampling to be useful. You need feedback from your core audience if you hope to communicate with them.

The third audience is the people who are in the “mainstream”, a mythological group of people who include pretty much everyone who’s not a part of your core audience. While “mainstream” supposedly refers to popular culture, the fact is it’s really too varied to count for much. It’s just changing too fast and doing different things for different people, trying to target it would be like trying to hit all the heads on a hydra with a single toothpick. Some people from the general public will love your work, some will hate it and the vast majority will most likely view it with a certain amount of apathy (if the majority loves it, you’ve crossed over into the rarefied atmosphere of the smash hit, and I’d love to hear how it’s done). Regardless, while it’s important to try and make sure the “mainstream” can understand what you’ve written, you cannot chase after their approval of stories or themes. If you do, your writing will have no identity and will never find a following.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to knowing your audience than what I’ve written. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to codify in one or two short articles. You have to read a lot of what your audience loves, you have to know some members of your audience personally and spend a lot of time with them. An author can’t just sit in a chair 24/7 and write then expect to be successful. He has to be out with his audience, as well. Fortunately, you’re probably going to like the people you meet, since your first audience is yourself and thus your second audience is likely to share interests with you.

So get up and go out for a bit, get to know your audience. Then, the next time you sit down, ask how your stories and theirs can link up. You may find your writing improves for it.

Cool Things: A Little Princess

Posted by natechen on

For those of you who’ve never heard of it, A Little Princess is a children’s novel by Frances Burnett about a little girl who lives a life of comfort and privilege, only to loose her father and fortune all at once. It’s a story about dealing with change, the importance of character and enduring times of trial.

While those may seem like heavy subjects for children’s literature, there are few things as dependable in life as change and trail, and few tools for dealing with them as powerful as character. As such, A Little Princess was and is an important piece of literature for equipping young people, and especially young women who are not as represented in literature as they might be, for dealing with life.

A Little Princess is also the latest production by all for One productions. Full disclosure: Like the last such production I mentioned, I will be appearing in this play.

If you’re interested, and particularly if you have a young daughter, this is a great play to check out. Performance dates are February 22-24 and March 1-3. Play begins at 8:00 PM on Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 PM on Sundays, with doors opening half an hour beforehand. Full ticket prices and ordering information can be found here.

If you live in the Fort Wayne area, I hope to see you there.

Heat Wave: Charge and Resistance

Posted by natechen on

Circuit

There was a moment of surprise as the man in the doorway drew back a half step. His attention had been on someone in the room, and he’d only seen me out of the corner of his eye. I had a split second before he realized he didn’t know who I was and I used it to plant my feet and drive my shoulder square into the center of his chest.

Now that may sound like an impulsive action for someone like me, who’s used to careful plans that require minimal effort. But in this case, it was the only option that made sense. He wasn’t sure who I was, because he hadn’t seen me clearly yet. I wasn’t wearing a mask or anything like that, so I looked fairly innocuous. I could try and pass myself off as someone passing through, like I had with that college student in Texas. In fact, that would be what I would try to do under most circumstances.

Except this wasn’t a normal job. I wasn’t breaking into a lab, a bank or a corporate office. I was in the basement of Project Sumter’s Midwest headquarters, a secure government facility, and I was about to break in to the evidence room. Playing coy wouldn’t help, and it would give this guy a clear look at my face. He had to be taken down as quickly and quietly as possible.

The idea was to slam him to the floor and hit him with enough current to keep him down for the count as he fell, then deal with whoever else was in the room before they could do something inconvenient, like grab a handgun or worse, call security. This plan hit an immediate snag when the other man didn’t go down.

In fact, he didn’t even back up or grunt in discomfort. It was like slamming into a brick wall, except not quite so abrasive. I shifted my feet to get better traction and pushed harder, but he still didn’t move. Trying all that didn’t take more than a second, and I was just about to back up to try something else when the blond man got around to grabbing me, one hand on one shoulder the other under the opposite elbow, and twisted me through the door and flat on my back on the ground.

I reached up with my left hand and snagged his ankle, then gave a sharp tug. Nothing happened. It was like trying to yank over a flag pole. I’m getting close to forty, and I’m not as spry as I used to be. Any other time I’d wonder if I was getting soft, that maybe the fall had taken more out of me than I thought. But here, in the basement of Project Sumter, I was certain I was dealing with a talent. And unfortunately, it was one I didn’t recognize.

With a twitch of my own talent I tripped the switch in my gloves, intending to trigger the electrodes built into them and carry out the electrocution part of my plan, even if the toppling part wasn’t working. I immediately discovered a new design flaw in my set-up. Rather than having a complete taser rig in both hands I had put a positive terminal in my left hand and a negative terminal in my right. With only one hand on my target, no current would flow unless the man was grounded in some way. Which he apparently wasn’t. And not even I can force circuit out of open air with so little charge to work with.

I tried to bring my right hand up and grab hold of his leg with it, but he was bending down at the same time to grab my left and it was a simple matter for him to switch targets and grab my right wrist. A second later Heavy Water slammed into his back and stopped dead. It was kind of eerie to see a six foot tall man, weighing in over two hundred pounds and in training stopped dead in his tracks by a man just as tall but at least twenty pounds lighter who wasn’t even paying attention to him. I probably would have given that some more thought if it hadn’t felt as if something extremely heavy slam into my left hand at that exact same moment. I lost my grip on the other man’s ankle and my entire arm and shoulder wrenched up and around and flipped me halfway over onto my chest. A dizzied glance didn’t show any source for what hit me, but I didn’t have much time to look.

The blond man held onto my other arm just long enough that getting flipped over wrenched it out of its socket before letting go and turning around to deal with Heavy Water, leaving me face-down on the floor, right shoulder in significant pain and left hand reporting that it was very possible some fingers were broken. And worse, I had no idea what had happened.

I’d like to say at this point that one of the many gifts my talent gives me is the ability to switch nerves on and off like all other electrical circuits. Alas, real life is not so convenient. I’m not sure if it’s the chemical component to nerves, or if some part of my subconscious just doesn’t want to tamper with my own body that way, or if there’s something else I don’t understand causing it, but messing with the nervous system is outside my abilities.

So I had to brace my left elbow and push myself up onto my knees with no relief from the pain. I was vaguely aware that someone had come up and put a hand on my shoulder, thankfully the one that was still socketed, and was saying something to me. Probably an admonition to behave myself. Grabbing his leg and shocking him down to the floor was simple, if uncomfortable.

He grunted in pain as he collapsed and then I gave him a second shock to the body, to make sure he stayed quiet. While I did so I heard the sound of ceramic breaking, followed by a wet splat.

I looked up to find that Heavy had stopped using plain force on the blond man and switched to tricks. Where I favor magnets and Tasers as my primary tricks, he carries a number of hard ceramic containers filled with ink and scored along one side. He’d apparently backed up from the other man and broken one on the door frame. The ink settled in his hand in one large glob, refusing to flow apart as he used his own talent to make it more viscous than cold oxtail soup. The blond man backed up a step but Heavy flipped it forward like a man pitching underhand and the whole glob flew in a gentle arc that slapped the other square in the face and stuck.

As Heavy’s victim staggered back, clawing at the ink blob and making a mess out of his hands for his trouble, I clambered to my feet and slapped both hands into his back, ignoring the shooting pains from my fingers and shoulder as I triggered my taser a third time. He stiffened and went down, proving that whatever his talent was, it didn’t make him immune to electricity as well as physical impact.

With the blond man finally out of commission I had enough time to glance around at the rest of the room. The first thing to do was to make sure there wasn’t anyone else in there, which was difficult with all the shelves running down the length of the room. But there wasn’t anyone here in the entrance, or behind the desk that was right next to it. I glanced over at Heavy, who was stripping the blob of ink off the face of the blond man so he wouldn’t suffocate. I jerked my head towards the back of the room. Heavy just nodded and slipped off, quiet as a ghost.

The second thing to do was check the charge in my vest. To my dismay, it was almost three quarters empty. Not much I could do about it at the moment, except do everything I could to avoid having to use it again on this trip. I made a mental not to come up with some way to charge it from conventional current without needing specialty equipment.

All that was left was priority number three. I stepped over to the computer and rested one hand on it.

A computer is nothing more than a massive collection of circuits that process information based on one factor, whether a given circuit is open or closed. These circuits form patterns upon patterns, and the astute mind which has had enough practice can interpret them. If they were born with the fusebox talent, they can even manipulate those patterns with a little practice.

It’s not the most elegant way to program a computer but it is a great way to get a look past firewalls or other password protections. And, since all I wanted to know at the moment was whether or not an alarm had been sounded, direct interface was the best way to go. It didn’t take more than a few seconds to determine that there was no sign of anything like an alert going through the system. No files were being deleted or removed, the firewall wasn’t locking the terminal out from the rest of the network and it didn’t look like anyone was trying to access the cameras in the room from outside. Satisfied, I lifted my hand off of the computer tower.

“Coming your way!” Heavy called. That was followed by a wet splat and the sound of someone falling to the floor. I hurriedly stepped away from the terminal and glanced down the rows of shelving. A short brunette woman lay sprawled on the floor in a puddle of ink that was no doubt as slick as oil. Of course, on a linoleum floor, like you find in most government buildings of a certain age, pretty much any liquid would make things slippery.

I stepped down the hallway to block the woman’s path, but I needn’t have bothered. Heavy was on her almost before I could do anything, slipping a plastic zip-tie around her wrists before she had a clear idea what was going on. A moment later she was gagged and dragged into the corner of the room.

While Heavy was doing that, and trussing up the other two men we’d stumbled into at the door, I started poking through the various boxes and other detritus on the shelves. When he finished and came to help me look around I said, “I hope she didn’t see your face clearly.”

“I told you we should have worn masks,” he said. “It’s not worth it to ‘look inconspicuous’ if they know who to throw in jail afterwards.”

“We’d never have gotten past that wall man if we wore masks, he’d have figured out we were up to no good in time have someone hit the alarm.” The boxes on the shelf were dated too early to be what I wanted. I waved for Heavy to follow me and moved on to the next aisle. As we walked I said, “If you’re worried about my methods you could always go in business for yourself. You’re certainly capable of it.”

“Not me, mister,” Heavy said, shaking his head emphatically. “I promised myself once that I’d never be one of those guys who just went around causing problems for the hell of it. You, you got standards, boss. But you still know that you need to raise havoc from time to time. I like that.”

“Um…” I really didn’t know what to say about that. “I’m not exactly an altruist, Heavy. I’m doing what I do because it needs to get done, true. But also because I’m the only person who can do it right. I prefer jobs well done, no matter how ‘important’ they are, to being a hero.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Heavy said, and shrugged. “Maybe you just don’t hear it like I do. Anyway, I like the work, it pays well and…” He glanced at the aisles of boxes. “I think it’s better for Grappler, too.”

Suddenly I found myself interested in the shelving as well. I realized we were now at the end of the last full aisle, the last row of shelves just beyond was empty. I headed down it. “Heavy, you know that I’ve never really-”

“Wall man.” Heavy said, cutting me off. “Is that what they’re called? That big blond guy from before?”

Grateful for the change of topic, I switched mental gears and thought about it for a second. “Honestly, I’ve never heard of anything like him. It’s not like I’ve seen a comprehensive list of all talents Project Sumter knows about, and I doubt any such list encompasses all the existing talents in the world. He’s really bothersome, whatever he is. I’m not even sure what he did to my arm. It’s like you rammed into me, instead of him.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Is any of what we do?” I pulled a box off the shelves and rifled through it. It was full of the kind of junk you’d expect in any mundane evidence box. Stuff in little plastic baggies, stuff in big plastic baggies, stuff in plastic baggies of every size in between. None of it looked like what I wanted. “Whatever it is, it has it’s limits. Good thinking dropping the ink on him, but why’d it take you so long to jump him?”

“Didn’t want to get shocked when you tased him,” Heavy said. “When I realized you weren’t going to be able to I tackled him, for all the good it did.” He waved to my right arm, still dangling slightly awkwardly. “Want to take a second to get your arm back in socket?”

“When we find what we need.” I put the lid back on the box I had pulled, wincing as my right arm moved in some way it didn’t like, shelved the box and picked a new one. This time it only took a few seconds of pawing through it to come to a conclusion. “This looks like part one.”

Heavy smiled and tipped his own box so I could see the contents. “And this is part two.”

I smirked and pulled a small case of tools from my belt. “I told you this would work out fine. Let’s wrap it up.”

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Viral

Posted by natechen on

If you are an unheard of person trying to make your mark on the Internet, then going viral is a dream come true. It means instant exposure to a huge audience, some part of which is probably going to find you and your content wildly appealing. That, in turn, means that you will get even more exposure, popularity, fame, wealth and general dating ability.

A brief interlude, in which I will explain what “going viral” means to my readers who are not “down” with “internet jive” (hi mom!) Going viral refers to when something on the Internet experiences a sudden boost in popularity entirely by word of mouth. News of the viral event travels from person to person and usually happens with little or no need for a middleman, much like an epidemic, from which the term “viral” comes. Social media has made it easier and easier for things to go viral over the Internet, just as modern transportation has made epidemics more and more of a worry. Any piece of media can go viral, but it typically refers to a YouTube video or, in rare cases a comic (as in a stand-alone illustration, although it sometimes refers to serialized webcomics).

A very recent example of a viral event is PSY’s Gangnam Style. If you are one of the five people in America who aren’t familiar with this little bit of Korean absurdity, let me spread the infection a little bit more.

Wasn’t that fun? Whether you like it or hate it, Gangnam Style is now a part of the American consciousness. A year ago, how many people you know could answer the following question:

“Who or what is Gangnam?

A) A district in Seoul, South Korea.

B) A battle mecha franchise from Japan.

C) A new kind of inner city gang.”

If you’re like mot people, the answer is none. But now they’ll all say, “Oh, that’s the song with the Asian guy who rides the ponies, right?” And they’d be right, because going viral has the power to define things in the cultural consciousness. And that’s on top of the fame, money and hordes of attractive single people.

Many people come to the Internet, and indeed to blogs such as this one, with a fairly simple plan in mind:

Step 1. Go viral.

Step 2. ???

Step 3. Profit!

What they quickly learn is that it doesn’t actually work that way. In fact, the order should probably be:

Step 1. ???

Step 2. Go viral.

Step 3. Profit!

You see, all the real work goes in before you make the big break. Even in the age of the Internet, there’s no easy win. You have to put in the time and dedication to make even a little bit of a mark. Viral videos generally have three things in common.

First, there’s the dedication to craft. PSY was a successful Korean pop artist long before he went viral. One of the earliest viral events was “All Your Base“, a video put together by video editing students as part of a major project. In fact, look at pretty much any major viral event that has resulted in lasting success and you’ll find that it had a higher than normal level of finish work, proof of a dedication to making good content. The creator probably had a string of much less successful work before they made their big break.

Second, there’s a love of what’s being done. Look at AutoTune the News, makers of more than one viral video. Sure, their videos are silly and the music isn’t really that memorable. But the real magic is that they bring out the music the creators hear in every day speech. That love goes into the songs they right and attracts people to them. By the same token, PSY has said that Gangnam Style was not created to be an international sensation. It was a love song to the Gangnam district, a celebration of all the things that make it unique and lovable.

Third, there’s a willingness to have fun. I’m not aware of any viral events on the Internet that are people playing things completely straight. If you want to go viral, you can’t take yourself very seriously. Again, look at Gangnam Style. PSY blows himself up, engages in a dancing duel with a man in a plastic suit and rides invisible horses everywhere. And he obviously has a great time doing it. We want to share that fun with him, and we’re sucked in with him.

Ultimately, I don’t think anyone can intentionally go viral. But your can create in such a way as to make it much more viable. On the other hand, when you go viral there are far fewer people who have been with you since the beginning and come to have a true appreciation of your work and goals. You may not have the support and emotional maturity to deal with the sudden exposure. And you may not want the huge, impersonal masses staring over your shoulder, wanting you to repeat the old successes when you’re seeking to press on to newer and better things.

Should you go viral? Well, that’s really up to you. It will probably be a fun and wild ride if you do. But whatever your goal, it’s best to work relentlessly at something you love. Keep presenting your work in the right forums, taking feedback and never give up and you’ll be surprised where you wind up.

Cool Things: “Chinese” New Year

Posted by natechen on

According to the Chinese Zodiac, the new year begins on February 10th, 2013. Like all great Chinese traditions, this has pretty much ignored any contradictory Western traditions, such as our having our own calendar that’s used pretty much world wide. There will still be huge celebrations in may places across Asia as the Year of the Snake officially begins.

As the child of mixed heritage (is that politically correct?) I’ve always had an interesting relationship with the Chinese New Year. It’s not a holiday my immediate family had any special traditions for, beyond occasionally visiting relatives. On the other hand, to my father’s side of the family it was frequently a time to touch base, enjoy good food and company and generally do everything that Americans generally associate with Christmas (including gift giving!) On the third hand, I could typically mention it to my friends and get nothing more than a blank look.

Ah, the good old days.*

Now there’s this thing called Wikipedia, and it has a table that not only tells you when the Chinese New Year falls, but what the technical term for the Chinese Zodiac is and which of animal’s year we’re about to embark upon (for those wondering, mine is the Year of the Rat, something my sister has always found most appropriate). The Internet and other forms of media are becoming more aware of these and other, similar, cultural events and my own home town of Fort Wayne, Indiana even has a Chinese Association that will be honoring the holiday in grand style.

So what happens on Chinese New Year? Well, a lot of things.

Traditionally, you set if firecrackers and do other rituals to ward off evil spirits. In spite of their relative modernity, the Chinese are still rather superstitious and there’s a while string of activities to ensure good luck and ward against bad luck that are most effective if done on New Year’s Day. Whether they’re continued for their stated purpose, or just to give people a chance to dress up in gaudy clothing and do the Dragon Dance is anybody’s guess – and it probably varies from person to person.

It’s also a time of family. Partly because this was a time to go back to the ancestral home and honor your ancestors – and again, some people probably still do that. But in part because the act of going back to the ancestral home brought everyone back together at the same time. And let’s face it, no matter how tough things are between people, when you cram thirty or forty of them into one house relationships have got to improve somehow – unless there’s a homicide, which probably doesn’t help anything. But anything short of that only serves to build family solidarity.

These days it seems like it takes weeks of planning and a military logistics team for families to get together in any way, shape or form. Sometimes you need an excuse to convince people it’s worthwhile. So go ahead, celebrate Chinese New Year. Go out and eat, cram your entire family into one house and give each other great, huge wads of cash so you can all start the year of in prosperity. And who knows? Maybe next time you won’t need an excuse.

But if you should, my mother’s side of the family can trace its roots back to Germany, where they have this funny little tradition called Oktoberfest…

 

*This statement is intended to be sarcastic. In case you are one of those people who misses these kinds of things.

Heat Wave: Circuit Breaking

Posted by natechen on

Helix

A law enforcement agency runs on three things – shoe leather, information and caffeine. There’s no particular hierarchy to those, by the way, you need all three in equal amounts. So I knew that, if I wanted to talk to Sanders, all I had to do was loiter around the coffee pot long enough and he’d show up. I wasn’t sure if I’d see Herrera or Mosburger first, and wasn’t quite sure how I’d explain what I was doing if I did, but fortunately that proved to be a moot point.

In fact, I’d only been waiting around for ten minutes or so when Sanders came out of his office and headed my way. There was a spring in his step in spite of the fact that, if they’d stayed on program, he was about to give the run down on one of the more frustrating cases we’d tackled in the last two or three years. It probably had something to do with having an excuse to test the waters with Herrera.

Normally I’d have no problem bursting Sanders’ bubble. The man can hardly keep his feet on the ground as it is, I figure anything I can do to help him keep his wits about him counts as a favor. But the correct way to bust someone’s bubble is to deflate their ego a little, not to drag up serial killers eight years dead. Just thinking about it had me scowling.

Scowling is enough of a typical expression for me that Sanders didn’t comment on it when I slid in next to him while he was filling a trio of disposable coffee cups. He just shot me a big grin and said, “I like her, Helix. She’s pretty, smart and charming. You don’t find all three that much, around here especially.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to strike a casual tone. “For instance, you’re just charming, and only on your good days.”

“Me?” He gestured to himself with the coffee pot, almost sloshing it all over the front of his shirt. Acting careless is one of his tricks to keep people off guard but he’s had way to much practice to actually drop, spill or otherwise loose control of something so easily and I didn’t rise to the bait. “I’m all charm, all the time. And you know there’s no one better looking in this building.”

“The night shift’s come in by now, Sanders, the building’s practically empty.”

He handed me a pair of full coffee cups and scooped up enough creamer and artificial sweetener to qualify most foods as a health hazard. “Speaking of charm,” he said, pouring additives into his own coffee until it was just a pale imitation of its former self, “Voorman’s not going to be happy with what you said on the phone tonight.”

“Which part?” I asked, flipping back through my conversation with Circuit in an attempt to identify something that might qualify as a problem.

The smirk on Sanders’ face hinted that I shouldn’t have bothered. “The way you answered the phone. That kind of language is extremely unprofessional and reflects badly on the Project. You know he’s touchy about those kinds of things.”

“Right,” I said, letting all the sarcasm out for the first time since I’d been reassigned. “I’ll certainly try to keep common courtesy in mind while I’m trying to distract megalomaniacs over the telephone. We certainly wouldn’t want those kinds of people to get the idea that we’re some kind of cut rate private security group instead of a well trained government agency.”

“That’s the idea, Helix. Keep it professional.” Sanders finished with his own coffee and started back towards his office, forcing me to tag along. I kept an eye out for other people as we went but, like I’d said, the place was mostly deserted at night. “What were you doing before the call, anyway? You weren’t at your desk.”

I dropped my voice and tone just a tad, not enough to sound like I was whispering conspiratorially, because that just attracts attention, but enough that it wouldn’t carry as well. “I was asking Cheryl to pull some files related to what you were asking me about at Mona’s party.”

Sanders paused and glanced at his office door. It was about twenty feet away and we could clearly see Herrera and Mosburger in there chatting with each other. There were both facing Sanders’ desk, and so they didn’t have a clear view of the door. Satisfied, Sanders looked back at me and said, “Was it any use?”

“Well, in a manner of speaking.” I fidgeted, suddenly wishing that I didn’t have my hands full. “There wasn’t anything conclusive there, but there is a possibility that Agent Herrera is the relative of a crime victim. One of the one’s we’ve investigated.”

“Well that’s interesting,” Sanders said, absently sipping from his coffee. “But I don’t know if it’s relevant. It’s true that we could just get her removed from the Project if your lead pans out, but it doesn’t really tell us what Senator Dawson’s motive for sending her here was. He’s still got another five or six years in office, assuming he doesn’t get reelected again, so we’re going to have to deal with him for a while yet. Better the devil you know, and all that.”

“All true,” I said. He did have a point there, and one we hadn’t thought of while hacking over the possibilities earlier. “But I thought you should know…” I glanced down at the coffee, then around at the room again. There still wasn’t anyone in sight beyond the two in Sanders’ office. Best get it over with. “We think she might be the daughter of one of Lethal Injection’s victims.”

For a moment Sanders didn’t show any reaction. Then I realized he’d gone pale, not an easy tell to pick up on a guy like him, and his coffee was sloshing in his cup. I started to say something, but Sanders rallied enough to beat me to the punch. “How sure are you?”

“Not entirely,” I admitted. “Injection’s second victim had a daughter named Teresa and there was an EMT, last name Herrera, at the scene.”

“Flimsy,” Sanders said. But it sounded hopeful, rather than dismissive.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” I said. “But I’m not a big believer in coincidence. There’s more going on here than we know yet, and somehow Lethal Injection plays into it. And I’m not just talking about the way Circuit’s connected to both cases.”

“Then find out what it is and bring it to me. Or Voorman,” Sanders said, jabbing at me with his coffee cup. “If it’s not important, I don’t see why you bring it up.”

“No? You’ve clearly never carried a grudge before.” Sanders adjusted his tie impatiently, clearly ready to have this conversation over with. But I didn’t think letting him out of it just yet was a good idea, and I took the opportunity to shove one of the coffee cups I was holding into his free hand. He stared at it as if he’d never seen it before. “Here’s something to think about. If she stays here, sooner or later Herrera is going to start poking around to see what really happened to her father and the man who killed him. That’s going to lead her to Operation East/West and Lethal Injection.”

He looked up from juggling coffee cups and said, “What are you going to tell her?”

“Me? Nothing.” Like most people would, Sanders was holding both cups in front of his chest, not quite touching but close. I stuck the third between them and he fumbled get them arranged into a pyramid that he could hold with only two hands. “I wasn’t on the scene with Lethal Injection was brought down. I’m certainly not the person who shot him.”

Sanders flinched and I folded my arms and looked away, already regretting shooting my mouth off. A classic example of why I tried to let Sanders do the talking most of the time. If only that was always an option this time around.

Still, it was a good thing I did look away just then, because I saw one of the other field agents, probably from Al Massif’s team, threading his way to his desk. I lowered my voice a bit more and said, “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.” I looked back in time to see Sanders nod, a perfectly normal expression tacked onto his face. “I’m out tomorrow, I’ll be at my workshop. Let me know if you need anything before I come in again.”

I tried to beat a hasty retreat but before I could get more than a few steps away Sanders said, “Oh, Helix?” I paused to glance back at him, but didn’t turn around. “Herrera said something about a meeting with you tomorrow. Does she know where you’ll be?”

“I haven’t heard anything about it,” I said. “She’s a trained investigator. If she needs me, she can find me.” Sanders just shrugged and we went out separate ways. After debating about it the whole way out of the building I finally decided I was too wound up to sleep. The workshop was closer anyways…

Circuit

“Sidearm?”

I checked the clip on my SIG, then loaded it and racked the slide. “Check.”

“Taser?”

I held up my hands to display the gloves I’d built my upgraded joy buzzer into after the last one proved to be poorly insulated. “We’ll be trying the static charge rig again.”

“Are you sure? You haven’t had a chance to test it out since the last time…”

“I’ll take my chances, Heavy,” I said, connecting the electrodes to the battery lined vest. As I’d hoped, it had proven fairly simple to keep the charge up by syphoning loose static charge, along with other forms of stray current, into the batteries. It wouldn’t last forever, but it did slow down the rate I burned through the reserve.

But Heavy didn’t seem very impressed with it’s performance so far. He just sighed and said, “It’s your funeral.”

“Trust me on this,” I said, checking the connections a second time. The vest supplied power to both the electrodes and the pair of electromagnets coiled around my arms. It was important to make sure they were connected to the right ports. There was a trigger for each one built into my new gloves, and it would be unfortunate if they wound up switched and I accidentally shock Heavy Water when what I really wanted was to extend my talent’s reach with a magnetic field.

Heavy didn’t question my faith in my handiwork, just turned around so his back faced me, not so much a snub as a request that I check his body armor. As I made sure he was firmly enmeshed in his gear Grappler leaned around the side of the driver’s seat and said, “Are you boys sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

“Yes,” I said, cinching Heavy into his armor a bit tighter. “Breaking and entering is a two person job, the better to avoid detection. We need my talent to bypass security and Heavy has more experience than you. And someone has to stay and drive the getaway car.”

Grappler sighed, doing her best to look both fetching and disappointed, the better to convince us to take her along. As usual, she succeeded admirably. But, while she’s probably the most striking African American woman I’ve ever met, I’ve also built an entire career, on both sides of the law, by ignoring distractions. I wasn’t about to start being swayed by one pretty face. “We’ll be back in an hour, two at most. If you don’t see us by then…”

“I know, go get Simeon and tell him the score.” She turned back towards the front of the van and settled into her seat again. “Get moving, then. I’ll meet you at the pick up point.”

Heavy turned around again and slipped a plain windbreaker over most of his gear. I was doing the same with a sport coat. “First problem is a security camera on the corner of the building,” Heavy said, leaning over one of our computer consoles. “It takes six seconds to sweep from it’s first position to the second, where it remains for four, then sweeps back and watches the other way for the same period of time. Cycle begins… now.”

We stepped out of the van and made our way across the street. I flicked my electromagnets on as I did so, keeping a careful count in my head. Twenty seconds later, as the camera settled into a position facing away from us, I locked the circuit powering its motor open, immobilizing it. Much less obvious than simply disabling it for a number of reasons. Any person in the security center watching it was much less likely to notice a stationary than one taken out by, say, an EMP. It’s also much more likely to be treated as a simple malfunction. And if it does go unnoticed at the time, the camera goes back to normal performance once we’re gone and no one is the wiser.

“Problem two,” Heavy said quietly, once I gave him the all clear signal and started across the street. “Exterior door. Plans show a simple mechanical lock.”

“Unlikely,” I mumured. And as I expected, the lock proved to be a complex mechanical-electronic hybrid. It looked like I’d need to swipe a key card while unlocking it if I wanted to enter the normal way. I’m sure, one of these days, people will realize this really isn’t any more secure than an old fashioned padlock and start throwing bars across the inside of their doors again, but until that happens places like these are my oyster. The building plans didn’t show any other security beyond this point and, aside from cameras, it should be a breeze.

The card scanner was right there in the open so I didn’t even need to use a magnetic field to manipulate it with my talent. I just rested one hand on it and motioned for Heavy to pick the lock. Once he was finished I disabled the sensor that monitored the door. While it blissfully thought the door was closed we slipped through, then I shut down the magnets and everything outside returned to normal. I tapped one thumb into the other palm, letting me check the charge left in my vest. Barely a tenth drained.

Heavy and I produced flashlights and switched them on to augment the dim lighting in the parking garage we found ourselves in. It was hard to see much of anything clearly, but I could tell that there was a row of cars stretching into the dark on our left, giving way to larger vehicles about forty feet away. To the right I could see the basic vehicle care facilities that go with any kind of serious motor pool.

I waved Heavy off to check on the vehicles while I moved into the maintenance bay. Beyond that I found what I really wanted, a door into the rest of the facility. It was closed and locked, but a quick check didn’t reveal anything beyond that. I nodded to myself and doubled back into the work area and started rummaging around. I finally found what I wanted a few minutes later. The motor pool’s collection of spare keys was kept in a lockbox on one wall. It was clearly labeled, which made things easier, but also locked. I could have just forced the lock, or perhaps cut it, with some of the tools on hand but finesse is a virtue in its own right, and so is staying in practice. I pulled out my own lock picks and got into the box in tolerable time.

The keys were all labeled by make and model, and came with remote operated locks, so I just took the first set of sedan keys I came across and hit the unlock and lock buttons. Then I closed up the lockbox and relocked it. A few minutes after I finished Heavy came back and joined me at the door. I raised an eyebrow and asked, “Finished already?”

“If you ever did this for a living you’d know how stupid that question makes you sound,” Heavy said, sliding past me to the hall door and cracking it open in a staggeringly short period of time. I had to admit, when it comes to this kind of thing Heavy Water’s in a league of his own.

You could tell just by the way he moved us from the motor pool down one floor to the basement of the building. Even though he had identified all the places cameras were likely to be installed, and even though it was after midnight and the building was, for the most part, as silent as a tomb, he still moved around ever corner with caution and approached every door with care. In under twenty minutes he had us from the motor pool down to the objective with nothing but a handful of security cameras, handled as easy as those outside, as obstacles.

The door itself was more of a problem. It looked like it was locked physically, with a camera fixed on it and probably someone at a desk with a panic button on the other side. The first thing I did was knock out the camera. Since it didn’t move, it had to be fried. Hopefully the fact that only one camera had gone dead would be enough to keep us from being noticed until after we were out.

On the bright side, it did give me a chance to test out a function of my new gear that I hadn’t had a need for yet. The magnetic coils around my arms were just as capable of creating a weak EMP as they were a more sedate magnetic field, and a brief burst from them left the camera inert. It also drained another twenty percent of my vest’s charge, which was less than satisfactory efficiency. I made a mental note to work on that as I used a more normal magnetic field to check that the camera was indeed out of service. The door would be more of a challenge, but now that we were free to move down the hallway I was confident that Heavy could get through it.

I strode up to the door and waved Heavy back for a moment, so I could check the door for electronic alarms of some sort. I had just leaned forward to touch the frame when the door swung in and revealed a tall, blond man in the process of coming out.

The door would prove to be much more difficult than I had anticipated…

Fiction Index

Nonlinear Writing

Posted by natechen on

Part One

Often one of the biggest excuses to not write you’ll hear from an aspiring writer is that they’re not “in the mood” (or perhaps that they are “waiting for inspiration”). On the one hand, it’s important to realize that writing, just like all other forms of art, is work. You have to sit down and do it on a regular basis, no matter what, regardless of how you feel about it. If you don’t, you never get better. On the other hand, there’s nothing to say that you have to slog through the writing in the most disagreeable way possible. It’s a difficult task, you might as well try to find ways to do it that don’t fight with human nature.

Part Four

Cool Things: Calvin and Hobbes

Posted by natechen on

The other day I mentioned the wondrous sport of Calvinball to a guy just a few years younger than I am and got a blank reaction. It was depressing and enlightening at the same time. My family and I are big fans of Calvin and Hobbes, the classic comic strip by Bill Watterson, but it’s coming up on twenty years since the strip went out of print.

That’s kind of sobering. I know I wanted to learn to read so I didn’t have to bug my older sister to read Calvin and Hobbes to me when the newspaper came each day. Calvin and Hobbes was a classic comic strip rivaled only by Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and, just like Peanuts, it offered a lot of cool things crammed into three or four black and white panels a day. So if you’ve never heard of Calvin and Hobbes, sit down and I’ll enlighten you! If you’re already a fan, join me in a bit of wistful reminiscing.

The main characters of Watterson’s comic strip are the eponymous Calvin and Hobbes. No, it’s not a comic strip about philosophers and theologians, although Watterson did sometimes ponder the deeper questions in an effort to bring a little class to the mostly practical or even flat and uninteresting “funny” pages. But the wild, hyperactive six year old Calvin and the sardonic, laid back stuffed tiger Hobbes were named for philosophers and theologians, and from the beginning hinted at something different about this little comic.

Many things about Calvin and Hobbes made it cool. Calvin was a wild child and a firebrand, constantly raging at any and every problem in the world around him, no matter how small or trivial. He would assault them with vigor and imagination, displaying a vocabulary light-years beyond most children the age of six, making one wonder how he could consistently get such bad grades in school. In addition to his clever verbal rants, Calvin also approached problems with a great deal of creativity and well applied tools, such as his sled, red wagon and cardboard boxes.

Watterson fearlessly delved into Calvin’s imaginary worlds, showing us Calvin’s many alter egos and the real life circumstances that inspired his flights of fancy with equal whimsy and enthusiasm. He might appear as a dinosaur, a space faring explorer or a hard-boiled detective, inserting the people he knows into whatever role is appropriate at the time (although the school teacher, Ms. Wormwood, was almost always a monstrous space alien.)

Hobbes, part time stuffed animal full time tiger, was an interesting example of this. Calvin finds Hobbes in a “tiger trap” he dug outside his house. Neither of his parents see Hobbes before Calvin drags him in over one shoulder. To most of the cast, Hobbes looks like an ordinary stuffed animal, but to Calvin he’s a living, thinking anthropomorphic tiger who frequently displays more good sense than Calvin does. In one of the clever moves that gave Calvin and Hobbes it’s defining flavor, we’re never really told exactly what Hobbes is. While only Calvin sees him as anything other than a stuffed animal, we frequently see Calvin in situations he couldn’t realistically have gotten into without the help of someone else. And that stuffed tiger is the only other one around…

Calvin lives in a world with varying levels of definition. For example, his parents are never named, and most people he knows have either fist names or last names, never both. Character who threatened that ambiguity, like Calvin’s Uncle Max, were quickly removed. Calvin, it seems, has the potential to be any hyperactive child we meet. Perhaps a warning to those of us who have gotten older and forgotten the days when scientific progress did, indeed, go “boink”.

But to me, the seminal moments in Calvin and Hobbes were always when the Time Fractal Wickets were taken out and they’d play Calvinball. There rules were simple – make it up as you go along and never use the same rule twice. It was a mad, slap-dash sprint through a dozen different sports with the ultimate goal of having fun and pushing your creativity. Just watching them playing it made your creative juices flow better.

Through the course of it’s ten years of publishing (interspersed with sabbaticals by the author), Calvin and Hobbes  introduced us to all sorts of weird and wonderful things. The G.R.O.S.s. club, dedicated to the annoyance of Susie Derkins (the only major character with a first and last name!), dozens of different kinds of weird snowmen (some of which moved around on their own and propagated the species!), and the cardboard box Duplicators and Transmogrifiers. We went up and down hills, around rocks and trees and into bushes while being taken on kinetic meditations on politics, philosophy and human nature. And at the end, we watched our friends sail off into the snow, crisp and clean like a blank sheet of paper. I have no doubt their adventures there were and are just as great as the ones they shared with us.

Watterson was very critical of the relationship between comic artists, newspapers and syndicates, and he felt that as long as the medium remained constrained by their demands it wouldn’t grow and would most likely grow stagnant and die. Two years after the disappearance of Calvin and Hobbes, Pete Abrams started publishing Sluggy Freelance and Illiad joined in with User Friendly just a short time later. As two of the longest running webcomics in existence in many ways they mark the beginning of the end of syndicate/newspaper domination of comics. Fifteen years later, they continue to thrive. Many others have come and gone in that time and, while none have the whimsy or imagination of Calvin and Hobbes, maybe for Bill Watterson it’s enough to have a step in the right direction…

Heat Wave: Flash Point

Posted by natechen on

Helix

“Ortiz’ daughter was named Teresa?” I leaned back in surprise. “Okay, I wasn’t expecting that.”

“What were you expecting then?” Cheryl asked.  “You are the one who wanted to see the file.”

“One of the EMTs who came to the scene was named Herrera.” I tapped the appropriate part of the old draft I had found. Cheryl flipped through the stack of papers to the correct final report. “I talked to him way back when, but I was hoping there might be something more on him in the file. Like whether he had a daughter.”

“But you didn’t realize Ortiz had a daughter, or that her name was Teresa.” Mona didn’t make it a question. “I find it hard to believe both men had daughters named Teresa. But if Ortiz’s daughter is the Teresa here now, under the name Herrera, shouldn’t you recognize her? Eight years is a long time, but you make the case sound like such a big deal…”

“I never met any of the families of the victims.” For which I was privately grateful. “Let’s face it, the Project doesn’t have enough coverage to be an effective first responder and Lethal Injection was spread out across two fairly large states. Mostly, by the time we arrived at the scene the locals had usually taken charge of any family of the victim, and it’s not like we have the extra personnel to assign our own family liaisons with. In fact, we tried not to tell the family anything about our investigations.”

“Which is sad but understandable,” Cheryl said as she ran one finger down the page she was looking at. “Here we are. Javier Herrera, married, three children. Doesn’t look like we dug any deeper than that. We don’t usually look too hard at incidental persons on the scene, so that’s not surprising.” She flipped the papers closed. “Still, Mona’s right, it does seem like a stretch to call it a coincidence that a man with Agent Herrera’s last name was there the day Teresa Ortiz’s father died. Ms. Ortiz would be the right age to be Agent Herrera, too.”

“So, speculation?” I tapped my fingers absently on the tabletop. “Did Javier Herrera take in Teresa Ortiz after her father was murdered? That would explain why Teresa Herrera’s records were sealed.”

“It’s possible, but it would require unusually fast work on the part of the local authorities to get it done before she came of age,” Cheryl said, absently stacking the East/West into a neat pile again. “Unless Mr. Herrera had some kind of pull, which you wouldn’t expect of the typical EMT. If Agent Herrera is Teresa Ortiz, then the sealed records are a real plus for her.”

“How so?” Mona asked.

“In the last year two field agents have turned out to have connections to the past victims of talented criminals,” Cheryl said. “In both cases those agents were immediately taken off of field work due to concerns about their objectivity.”

“But they leave field agents with long working histories with talented criminals on the same case for years,” I muttered.

Mona spared me a sympathetic look. “New question. If Agent Herrera is Teresa Ortiz, why did Senator Dawson spend so much political capitol getting a handpicked agent into the Project when finding out such a simple thing could get her removed from her position?”

That was a great question, and it quickly became apparent that Mona didn’t have the answer. We stared at her for a moment and she blushed a bit. “Maybe there’s just something about her that puts her ahead of the pack?”

“There’s nothing in her HSA record that’s particularly stands out,” Cheryl said. “I mean, she was efficient and had a good record, but nothing that puts her in the top five percent, say.”

“I didn’t realize they ranked people like that,” Mona said.

“I think we’re using the Cheryl O’Hara Snap Judgement ranking system,” I said, reaching over to tug the East/West file away from Cheryl.

She put one hand on top of it to keep it in place. “You haven’t officially signed that out yet. Maybe Herrera came up with a novel approach to catching Circuit?”

“I’ll sign it out as a resource on Open Circuit later, his phone call certainly makes it relevant,” I said. Cheryl’s hand didn’t move so I relented and pulled back. “And Herrera did have the location of Circuit’s warehouse, but I’m not sure that would explain why the Senator pushed so hard to get her into the Project. It was a minor tip, and very recent. This kind of thing has to have been in the works much longer than that tip was around.”

“Maybe the Senator had a new idea to catch Circuit, and he needed someone to help him try it out?” Mona rested her chin in her hand and stared absently at the far wall, sure sign that the wheels were starting to turn at high speed. “But that wouldn’t explain why he’d choose Teresa as his catspaw.”

“No, I think Cheryl was on to something,” I said, slowly cracking my knuckles as I thought about it.

“I was?” Cheryl straightened a bit. “About what? Herrera not being a stand out?”

“Not exactly.” I drummed my fingers again as the idea coalesced. “It’s just that when I first met Agent Herrera she was with Senator Dawson and I wasn’t quite sure how he could stand being around her. She strikes me as a natural born people person, with tons of charisma and presence and she’s better looking to boot. Why would he let himself be overshadowed that way?”

“You’re not really helping us explain why the Senator would want Herrera in the Project,” Mona pointed out.

“That’s just it, what if he didn’t want her in, but she did. What if she was the one looking for any available route into Project Sumter and decided Senator Dawson was the path of least resistance.” I leaned forward and tapped Cheryl’s file. “She’s got a powerful motivation, at the least.”

“So you think she’s here for revenge? A real life Batman, out to fight the talented criminals so they can’t cause other people grief?” Cheryl asked thoughtfully. “It’s possible.”

“But it doesn’t explain how anyone, no matter how motivated, could get Senator Dawson to spend a great deal of political capitol getting them admitted to Project Sumter when the Project is very likely to kick them out as soon as they stumble across the right file. Which we’ve just proved doesn’t take that long.” I opened my mouth to say something but Mona kept going. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the Senator must have thought there was something worthwhile he could get out of the arrangement.”

“I’ve never met Senator Dawson,” Cheryl said. “And I’m not really that familiar with the Senate Committee decisions, since Records only deals with field reports. What does he want to do that having a field agent in the Project could help him accomplish?”

“He could get information that usually isn’t forwarded to the Senate Committee,” I said. “Or keep abreast of developments in cases without being reliant on official Project sources.”

Cheryl’s face made it clear that, whatever she thought of that, it wasn’t very nice. “While I’ll admit that’s something, I’m not sure it’s worth all the effort it took to get Agent Herrera into the Project. Mona makes it sound like it took a lot of work.”

“It did,” Mona said. “I can’t say much beyond that, but it is something Senator Dawson has been working towards for some time. I’ll agree that whatever he might want Herrera in the Project for, it’s probably something more significant than just an inside source.”

Not something I really wanted to think about. The long and the short of it is, a lot of the safeguards that keep talented people like myself safe from persecution and exploitation rely on secrecy. That’s one of the major reasons why, nearly a century and a half after it’s creation, Project Sumter remains a top secret, undisclosed portion of the government. Secrecy is part of our lifeblood and to people like me, who have been raised with the reality of talent since our births, there’s few things more important. Not even our Senate Committee gets to know everything about us. If compromising Project secrecy was just a side benefit of getting Herrera into her current position, how bad was Dawson’s real scheme?

“Maybe we’re thinking of this the wrong way.” Cheryl leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers, tapping her chin with her thumbs. She didn’t have the same level of commitment to secrecy as I did but, as part of the Records department, it was still a major part of her job. While she hadn’t seemed excited about playing politics with the Senator’s hand picked oversight agent when I first asked for the East/West file, now she seemed a little more invested in the idea.

“The Senator’s biggest failed initiative was his proposal to require all talents to register in a database that would list their name, current location and talent.” She glanced at me. “I can mostly guess why you might not like that idea, Helix, but what are the official reasons it got shot down?”

“Budget,” Mona said immediately. “There just aren’t enough resources allocated to the Project to make such a thing feasible, even if it weren’t kept a secret. We barely have the resources to do normal law enforcement and locate and brief new talents that show up. Tracking all the known talents in the country would require us to tripple our staff, at the very least, and there just isn’t enough money for that, never mind enough trained people.”

“There’s also the privacy and other civil rights issues,” I added. “Many members of the Committee were concerned about what might happen to their careers if they were ever associated with a program to monitor people who weren’t guilty of anything more dangerous than being born with unusual potential. Our friends in the Justice department-” Mona suddenly bolted upright and darted out the door. “-had similar concerns.”

There was a brief moment where we just sat there, Cheryl looking stunned while I tried to think of other recent changes in procedure that might be credited to Senator Dawson. “There was a plan a while back to try and get more experienced legal advisors onto the staff, but that failed for reasons that don’t have anything to do with the Senator. In fact, I think that was actually a pretty popular idea with everyone but the lawyers.”

“Right,” Cheryl said, still looking at the conference room’s door. “More importantly, should I be worried about whatever Mona’s up to?”

“Oh, that?” I glanced back in the direction Mona had headed. “Happens all the time.”

“If you say so.” She blew out a breath. “Why didn’t the lawyers like the idea?”

“I think it didn’t pay enough.”

“Naturally.” There was another moment of silence while we contemplated Shakespeare’s famous suggestion to kill all the lawyers, but before I could suggest we look into that as a new policy initiative Mona swept back into the room carrying a small pamphlet that looked vaguely familiar.

“What’s that?” Cheryl asked.

By way of answer Mona spread the pamphlet out on the table. Among other things there was a prominent picture of Senator Dawson smiling at some sort of event and one of those tear-out donation cards. “Senator Dawson brought in a stack of these during his last re-election campaign. There were a bunch of them left in various places around the building, I don’t think anyone took one.”

“He’s from Wisconsin,” I said. “How many people here could even vote for him?”

“I’m not sure that matters to us right now,” Mona replied, skimming over the pamphlet. “I didn’t take one but I did read one, once. Here we are. ‘If elected, the Senator will push for funding to support research into all spheres of medical stem cell treatments, including existing embryonic stem cell lines, adult stem cells and hybridized stem cells.'”

“What’s a hybridized stem cell?” Cheryl and I asked as one.

“It’s a new approach to gene therapy crossed with adult stem cells,” Mona said. “With adult stem cells you grow new organs or some such based on the person’s own genetic code. But if the person you’re treating has some sort of congenital defect, you’re likely to wind up with the same problem all over again. You can’t grow a good heart off bad blueprints, for example. The theory behind hybridization is, you replace whatever the faulty genes are with functional genes from a healthy individual, then grow the new organ.”

“They can’t even get stem cells to grow organs yet, regardless of where they come from,” Cheryl said. “Why push such far flung research?”

“I don’t know.” Mona began folding up the pamphlet again. “But we don’t know much about talents and genetics yet, even after several decades of research. What if all it takes is a hybridized stem cell treatment to create new talents?”

My gut clenched at that idea. “You think the Senator was somehow working towards that?”

“It’s a possibility,” Mona said, putting the pamphlet aside. “But it’s based on a lot of fairly fragile evidences and suppositions. The Senator’s campaign goals. Teresa Ortiz as Agent Herrera. The Project’s current lack of significant data on existing talents, which the Senator has tried to remedy.”

That’s a getman’s life in a nutshell. Make fragile leaps of logic. Astound everyone when you’re right. I knew better than to write her conclusions off, and apparently Cheryl did too, but she also saw something I hadn’t thought of yet. “Why does putting Agent Herrera in the Project help Senator Dawson develop hybridized stem cells?”

“Easy,” Mona said. “We can’t maintain a database on all known talents, but criminal talents are different. They’re imprisoned and monitored just like any other criminal. And one of the things we do is take a DNA sample from each talented criminal we arrest.”

“And then, whenever there’s a crime involving a specific kind of talent you compare forensic evidence found at the scene against known criminal talents of the same type. I’ve seen some of those Forensics reports. Records, remember?” Cheryl pointed at herself in case we weren’t sure what she meant. “I’m not an expert on genetics, but I don’t see how those DNA records might help the Senator with his hybridized stem cell schemes, assuming he even has any. There’s only a few hundred criminal talents on record, and half of them probably don’t have DNA on record, since they’d have been active before the technology for it existed. That leaves maybe two or three examples of any given talent for study. Scientists need hundreds of examples to get an accurate picture of gene structures, don’t they?”

“A ambitious field agent with a chip on her shoulder would push aggressively to arrest more criminals,” Mona said, ticking the points on her fingers. “We’ve already seen that in Agent Herrera’s push to arrest Circuit. More criminal talent records results in a larger statistical sample. It also makes it easier and easier to make the case that a comprehensive talent database would save us effort in investigating and prosecuting talented crime.”

“That’s nonsense. There’s no evidence that Circuit was ever even contacted by-”

“Ladies!” I waved my hands for their attention. “I don’t think we’re going to get any farther on just speculation. It’s time to go out and look for some evidence.”

I started to get up from my chair but Mona waved me back down. “Hold on. Where are you going?”

“Um… to think about how to get some evidence?”

She shook her head sadly. “You know, Sanders may have been the one to recruit you into helping manage Herrera, but he’s not the only one Voorman has working on this.”

“I appreciate that, Mona,” I said. “But if anyone has the connections to run down what happened to Teresa Ortiz after her father died, it’s San-”

“Me,” Cheryl said. When we turned to give her that look surprised people always seem to give, she just shrugged. “If the Senator is trying to pull something weird with the Project records I don’t want to be involved in it. But,” she held up a finger to emphasize her point, “if there is no connection between the two Teresas then your whole line of reasoning goes from sketchy to worthless, and I’m out. You can get Sanders to run down the information you need in the future.”

I glanced at Mona, since I wasn’t part of the inner circle in this whole unofficial probe into Herrera’s past it would be better to let it be her call. She said, “That sounds fair. And with the Firestarter case still open and who knows what else likely to wind up on our plates in the near future, what with Circuit still at large and two new talents in town, who knows how much free time Sanders will have in the near future. If you want to tackle tracking down what happened to Teresa Ortiz I don’t see any reason to say no.”

“Okay, with that settled…” I pointed at Mona. “There is something you could look in to. You majored in Biology in college, right?”

“Yes…” She could clearly see where this was going.

“In your spare time, see if there’s anything to that wild stem cell idea. If someone’s looked into it and proved it can’t be done, then that’s probably not the Senator’s actual goal here. Otherwise, try and figure out what other things he might be doing to push that idea while Herrera’s doing her thing here.” I got to my feet and started towards the door, then paused and glanced back at the two of them. “And no one mention this to Sanders just yet. I’ll break it to him.”

Cheryl raised an eyebrow. “You?”

“Me.” I sighed. “East/West was a nasty case for everyone. But of all of us, here, it was probably worst for him. He should find out it’s coming back to haunt him from someone who was there.”

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Fiction Index

Character Changes

Posted by natechen on

To recap – we’re talking about building characters. Not the nuts and bolts part of building characters, where you work out their relationship with their parents, where they were born, where they went to school and whether they enjoyed being in marching band. We’re talking about the action, the plot, the drama – how your character reacts to his story and what happens as a result. In other words, what makes the difference between a character who just takes up word count and a character who sticks in your mind for years to come.

First off, we looked at why your character probably shouldn’t want anything to do with the problems that first face them. (Check the comments for the full story on that.)

Then we looked at the art of believable decision-making. Discussing decisions brought us to the edge of this week’s topic: Character growth.

Before we begin, let me note that character growth is of varying levels of importance to different kinds of writers. Authors of novels and screenplays need to have character development if story is their primary goal. On the other hand, in many TV shows, comic strips and even, to a lesser extent, comic books, status quo is god and character development is actually something to be avoided. That said, I feel that this is just one of the weaknesses of those latter mediums in the modern era, so I’m going to assume that if you want to be one of those status-quo-cultists, you’ve stopped reading this already.

As I mentioned last week, the people we know are changing all the time, so we expect the people we see in fiction to be doing the same. Since we only see fictional characters in the context of their stories, they need to change visibly within those stories or they don’t seem believable. (Note that your story may take place over a very short period of time, and you may have to work at making that change seem believable. It’s important to think about these aspects of the story while it’s still in the planning stages.)

So what kind of changes can your characters make? Well, they might make a totally circumstantial change – going from rich to poor, or sick to healthy. They might make changes in relationships, making peace with a person they had previously been at odds with or, perhaps most commonly in modern fiction, falling in love with someone they met on the way. And finally, they might make a moral change, choosing to stop or start doing something because it is the right thing to do, or rejecting previously held standards as confining or misplaced. The best characters will make changes of all three types, although not necessarily of the same magnitude.

For example, a man might wreck a car, make up with his girlfriend while in the hospital and decide to give up smoking so he can take care of himself better (and make saving up for a new car easier). You don’t always have to tie the changes together like that, but there’s nothing wrong with it either.

What’s really important in showing changes is to make it clear that your character’s decisions throughout the story have led up to these changes. In the above example, maybe the man’s constantly avoiding talking out his differences with his girlfriend have put him under so much stress he wasn’t paying attention while he was driving. His insistence on smoking might be one source of tension between the two or maybe they’re both smokers and he’s resisted giving it up so she wouldn’t feel awkward when they were together.

This week’s example is Kuzco, the wacky narcissistic emperor from Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove, a character who showed significant growth and change, even if it wasn’t all in the most believable of ways (how did Kronk and Yzma get back before Pacha and Kuzco?)

When the Emperor gets turned into a llama he’s in real trouble, particularly with his old adviser trying to make sure he doesn’t get back to normal. And it’s highly unlikely that he’ll be able to drag himself through the jungle all on his own. Enter Pacha. He’s got some disagreements with Kuzco, and a generally better view on life, but he’ll let himself be bribed into leading the Emperor back home. It’ll take a number of double crosses and at least one blatant plot hole to get him there, but by the end of the journey Kuzco’s attitude has improved for the better and the differences between Kuzco and Pacha are mostly resolved. Now if only extract of llama could be gotten from the neighborhood parenting supply store…

A challenge for you this week is to go back and reread (or rewatch) one of your favorite stories and write down all the characters who you feel changed, how they changed and what contributed. Once you’re done, you should have a better idea what kind of stories you want to tell about your own characters.