Thunder Clap: Moving Fast

Posted by natechen on October 6, 2014

Izzy

“This is a portable GPS navigation device.” Lincoln held up a black plastic rectangle about the size of an e-reader like he was a sleazy salesman, running one hand along the bottom for dramatic effect.

“Those aren’t exactly new tech,” I said dryly. “Dad got mom one because she kept getting lost running errands.”

“Yeah, but it’s special because it’s got maps loaded on it and doesn’t need Internet access. We’re starting to run out of phones with navigation programs that use preloaded maps. We borrowed it from the roadies of one of the opening acts and they’re probably going to want it back so try and keep it away from EMPs.” He tapped a few icons with the stylus and zoomed in on a specific intersection. The end destination the GPS was pointed towards was on the northeast corner. “This is where we need to go.”

“What makes you sure?” Jane asked, looking at him rather than the maps or floor plan. “It’s a bookstore, not an electronics store or something like that.”

“Three factors. To make an EMP you either need a fairly big device consisting of an antenna and a capacitor bank or a nuclear weapon. We’re assuming Circuit went with option one, since there haven’t been any massive explosions in the city tonight. ” Lincoln held his hands a few feet apart and sketched out a box about that tall and deep but twice as long. “You could probably make an EMP with a six, maybe eight block range about so big. EMPs get exponentially weaker as you go out from the source, just like magnetic fields, so it would be more effective to have a lot of small units than one large one and allow for more precise targeting when you deployed them. But most importantly, an EMP weapon of that size could easily be hidden in the utility room of the average two-story storefront.”

“But it would have to be a building of about that size,” Clark added, picking up the line of thought. “Smaller buildings don’t usually have a connection to the power grid robust enough to recharge that kind of weapon quickly.”

“Depending on what part of town you’re in that still leaves a lot of places that could house one of these things,” I pointed out.

“But if you narrow them down by sites Keller Realty has worked on the list shortens to one location.” Clark took the stylus from Al and tapped the GPS screen a few times, leaving us looking at a zoomed out map of the neighborhood. Other than the place they’d shown us before only one other red destination dot showed on the screen. He pointed at it and said, “This is the next closest place that fits both criteria of size and Keller Realty involvement but it’s outside the six to eight block radius range of effect for the weapon we’re assuming Circuit’s using.”

Cheryl leaned back and folded her arms over her stomach, chewing her lower lip thoughtfully. “How certain are we the Keller Realty line of inquiry isn’t another false lead? We did pick up on it from files left behind, in a very conspicuous fashion, at a site Circuit had already abandoned.”

“Believe me,” Clark said, rubbing at his temple, “we had that argument more than once in the last sixteen months. What it boils down to is, these are the leads we’ve got. And the message Helix got from Circuit earlier seems to have come from Waltham Towers, which is a connection back to Keller Realty.”

“Half of cracking a case is running down all the leads,” Teresa said. “We’d be negligent if we didn’t check this out. The question is, who goes and who stays?”

“I’ll lead the team,” Al said. “Clark comes because he’s a field analyst and we keep them handy in the field for good reason. Jane and Izzy, I’d like you two to come as well. That will give us plenty of firepower if we need to tangle with thugs again, or if Circuit has some sort of guards on this place. Teresa, you’ll be in charge here and watch for Circuit causing trouble and let Helix know what we’re up to if he gets back before we do.”

Teresa grimaced, clearly not happy with being benched but apparently seeing the sense in it. “If you’re not back in ninety minutes we’ll start thinking about coming in after you.”

“Fair.” All glanced around the circle. “Anyone spot any problems in the plan?”

“I should go with you instead of Jane.”

I looked at Amp in surprise. “I thought you said you couldn’t hear as well in the city. How does your being there help?”

She gave me a scalding look. “Because even if I can’t hear I can still make noise. Shouting people into ruptured eardrums is pretty effective and I can do it from farther away than you three can punch them into submission. More importantly, I can hear security cameras running from across a street, and if Circuit can control all the electricity in a city you bet he’s found some way to keep the security measures on the buildings he’s hidden weapons in running.”

Al grunted. “Fair enough. You’ll come with us, Jane and Gearshift will back up Cheryl and Teresa here. Teresa is in charge until Helix or I get back.”

“What about me?” Lincoln asked.

Al shrugged. “You’re free to go home or stay here, since you’re not technically with the Project in an official capacity. But if you, Cheryl and Teresa could put your heads together and come up with somewhere we can move our base of operations to once this is done it would be a big help.”

Lincoln turned thoughtful. “There’s a few possibilities. I might even know of somewhere with a backup generator. Leave us the GPS and I’ll get back to you.”

Al handed him the device and said, “All yours. Let’s go, people.”

——–

Helix

Grandpa used to tell me that the only one who hated piggy back rides more than he did was whoever he was giving one to. After crossing the city on Samson’s back all was clear.

We crashed down on the helicopter pad after about half an hour of jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Samson insisted that the whole heroes run on rooftops was a legitimate thing since anyone who could move at thirty miles an hour on foot didn’t have the reflexes to avoid pedestrians at street level but still wouldn’t go fast enough to avoid vehicle traffic. I took his word for it, mainly because when he tried to explain it to me he slowed down and I wanted to get off his back as soon as possible.

As I was shaking my legs out and hoping desperately to get them bending in the right ways again Jack and a team of guards pour out onto the roof of the building. In unison Jack and I said, “What are you doing here?”

Jack glanced at Samson, looked at the way I was standing, and shook his head. “Never mind. I think I figured it out. You need to clear the pad, chopper’s coming in.”

In point of fact that should have been immediately obvious since the sound of the approaching helicopter could already be heard approaching. Samson and I hustled off of the pad and over towards the door to the stairway. There was a short wait as the chopper came down over the building, maneuvered into position and lowered itself down.

I was tempted to ask Jack who it was who felt he needed to show up in a helicopter, rather than flying in to the airport and taking a car but I felt I had a pretty good idea. And, given the problems we’d run into on our way here, I thought I had an idea why taking a car might not have been a viable option.

Samson’s mind was apparently running along the same lines as mine. As the chopper settled to a rest and the blades began to slow he asked, “Have you or any of the emergency responders in the city tried sending units into the parts of the city without power?”

“First vehicles went out from police dispatch almost three hours ago, maybe ten minutes after the power went out. They stalled out two blocks outside the effected area.” Jack shrugged helplessly. “The police have a few units on bicycles in there, there’s a hospital with a working backup generator and landlines that’s in touch with it’s opposites out here and they tell us ambulances are still running, at least so long as they don’t try to cross from a part of the city with power to one without, or vice versa. But that’s about all that’s in there right now. Sanders is trying to assemble a team that can get into the city on foot but he’s operating on the assumption this is Circuit’s handywork and that he wouldn’t leave any holes in his defenses we could sneak a vehicle in through.”

While it was the obvious conclusion to reach, I was worried that everyone I knew seemed to have automatically assumed Circuit was behind the attack. It sure was his style but instantly focusing on him could blind us to other possibilities that might open useful lines of thought, even if our terrorist was Circuit and not someone using his name as a smokescreen.

Still. “That was a good thought,” I said. “Someone claiming to be Circuit did contact me while we were in the effected part of the city. Says he’s taking over, stay out of his way, you get the picture. But something about all this bugs me. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“Well hold on to that thought,” Jack said. “There’s a meeting in about ten minutes for all senior personnel.”

“Go-go Project Sumter,” I muttered. “Meetings are our idea of action.”

Jack grinned. “Let me know how that goes.”

“What, you’re not going to be there?” He started to make a comeback and hesitated for just a second. Jack had recently been moved up to field agent training supervisor, a senior position, which he had no doubt just remembered.

“Remind me why I wanted to be a senior manager again?”

“Don’t look at me, I don’t worry about that kind of thing anymore.” A short, rotund figure was climbing out of the helicopter onto the landing pad. “Although I have a feeling Senator Voorman has a better idea about regretting career changes than us.”

As his old field supervisor and security escort made their way off the landing pad Samson rushed forward and wrapped him in a giant hug. Jack watched the greeting then shook his head. “How are those two friends? Makes no sense to me. Voorman’s never been anything but administrator – a good, sure, but still. He only got elected because you and Samson got behind him and pushed. Office pool gives him twelve to one odds of surviving reelection.”

“He’s full of surprises,” I said. “Didn’t expect to see him here, that’s for sure.”

“Wonder why he’s here.”

I turned and started for the stairs. “We’ll find out at the meeting. Gonna try and get the rundown from Sanders before we start – and there’s someone we need to bring in on this case pronto.”

“Who’s that?” Jack asked.

“Mister Roger Keller.”

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Writing Men: Daniel Ocean

Posted by natechen on October 3, 2014

This segment has talked a lot about the components of writing men but it hasn’t really analyzed a male character and broken down the elements that make them work, what makes them distinctly masculine and well written without falling into the traps that tend to characterize the gender wars. Since the point of this segment is examining what goes into writing a realistic male character, that’s kind of an oversight and it’s one that’s about to be remedied. But before we do that, if you haven’t watched the 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven you might want to do that.

Today we’re going to discuss the character Daniel Ocean and how he embodies the male thought patterns and behaviors that we’ve discussed so far (and one we haven’t but we’ll get to soon.) I’m not going in the order I’ve discussed them in but rather the order we see them in the film.

To start with, we see Daniel Ocean alone.

Yes, I know that he’s technically in front of a parole board but all we see is him, sitting in that chair and he’s talking about the things he thought about while he was essentially isolated from all his connections and usual lifestyle in jail. With Danny leading a team of eleven, plus the villains and miscellaneous other characters, there’s just no time to leave him alone at any other point in the story so this is our glimpse into his inner workings and how he feels he’s been inadequate in the past. He explains what he did to go to jail and he explains what went wrong. And in those few moments we get a pretty good idea of what the movie is going to be about, although we don’t really know it at the time. In other words, we get solitude refining Daniel’s understanding of his own objectives and, in the process, passing that understanding to us.

But like all good foreshadowing, we don’t see it at the time.

Once out of jail Danny moves on to find Rusty, his right hand man, and confronts him over a game of poker. Here we get our axiom for the movie in an interesting kind of reversal delivery. Rusty is in the middle of teaching a bunch of Hollywood actors to play poker when Danny arrives. The undercurrent here is that Rusty doesn’t want Danny pulling him back into the conman-thief lifestyle that they clearly enjoyed previously. What’s going on?

We get a clue when Rusty asks his poker players what the first rule of the game is. The answer: “Don’t bring personal feelings to the table.”

Then Rusty proceeds to misread Danny’s hand entirely and looses the pot. The lesson for the audience? Personal feelings are on the table. In fact, this whole thing is personal. That’s the axiom Daniel will live by and is living by. Sure, the job they’re about to pull is going to make everyone a lot of money but that’s not what Daniel Ocean is interested in. It’s really just there to convince all the people he needs in his camp to go along with him.

Next we see Danny and Rusty recruiting their team. As the film title suggests they wind up with nine other people but we’re only really interested in the last one of these for the purposes of examining Daniel Ocean, the man. That character is Linus Caldwell and he’s a pickpocket. When we first see him, Danny comes up and picks his pocket – right after Linus has just picked the pocket of a wealthy Wall Street business man.

This brief moment of competition establishes Danny as more skilled than Linus and sets up Danny for another classic masculine behavior – mentorship. This is the part we haven’t talked about much so I’m going to leave it sit for the moment, but only after I point out that this relationship works in part because Danny establishes his credibility in such an obviously male fashion – by proving he can one up Linus. That makes him the logical mentor for Linus and gives him the figurative muscle he needs to push Linus into growing his skills in ways he otherwise might not have.

Linus also introduces us to Danny’s true objective, as Linus is the character to introduce Tess, Danny’s wife. Tess wasn’t aware of her husband’s scheming, thieving lifestyle when they got married and when Danny was inevitably found out she left him. Now she works with, and is romantically involved with, the owner of a Las Vegas casino – the casino that Danny and his crew plan to rob. For the crew, it’s about stealing money. For Danny it’s about stealing his wife back. The objective isn’t business, it’s personal.

Which brings us to the one aspect of writing men we haven’t discussed yet: Sacrifice.

The whole movie is about what Danny is willing to sacrifice for Tess. Terry Benedict, the man they’re robbing, is ruthless and heartless but he hides that from Tess. If he ever finds out Danny was the man who robbed him, Benedict will have no problems finding them and having them killed – financially or morally. Danny is risking his life in a last chance bid to warn his wife of the kind of man she’s turned to and beg her to come back to him. At first glance it looks like desperation. On some level it is.

But deep down, it’s courage. Tess has become Danny’s highest priority and he just can’t find it in him to put anything else higher. Not the rules of his old profession. Not the risk of loosing the esteem of the people he’s worked with or of loosing his parole and going back to jail. Not even the fear of death at the hands of Terry Benedict.

In his own way, Daniel Ocean is a man on fire, just like any action movie hero. And in his portrayal we see the defining elements of writing good male characters.

Cool Things: Balance and Ruin

Posted by natechen on October 1, 2014

Video games are considered a lot of things these days but an art form is rarely one of them. That’s too bad, since there are several aspects of them that require very careful craftsmanship to be done right and it’s the mastery of craft under difficult conditions to communicate our thoughts that creates great art. One of the aspects of video games that’s seen the most forceful realization of this principle is the creation of music for them.

In the early days, when Nintendo was making the first installments of it’s well known Mario and Zelda franchises the technology available could only really create a single tone at a time. To create music that would really inspire the sense of adventure and fun that went with those early games the composers probably spent days writing simple, powerful melodies one note at a time that would go on to define a generation. Don’t believe me? Listen to the theme from Mario 1-1.

Now find a person between the age of fifteen and forty. Whistle the first three notes of that tune and at least two thirds of those people will not only join you by the third note but go on to complete the entire tune. The music was that strong, that memorable, that good.

Now Mario is a cultural touchstone, his face is almost synonymous with video games and it’s no surprise that his tunes would be well known, too. There are plenty of other examples of video game music as art, rather than just part of commercialized escapism. The influence just isn’t as widely felt.

One of the key things that sets great art apart is that it inspires. By this standard some people might argue that video game music falls short. They will suggest that the music behind a mindless diversion can’t possibly serve to inspire others to create. To these people I offer one small glimpse of just how far down the rabbit hole goes.

The name is Balance and Ruin.

It’s a seventy four track album of music assembled by the OverClocked Remix community and inspired by Final Fantasy Six.

OC Remix is a community devoted to exploring video game music as an art form and most of their work are remixes, reimaginings of old music through new technology or stylistic choices. Several people in the OC Remix community have gone on to work as professional musicians. Their tributes to game music is more than derivative – in fact, a panel of community judges must approve each piece of music not only for artistic and musical quality but originality – and it shows a creativity that is always impressive and sometimes breathtaking.

It’s very, very hard to adequately describe music with text and explaining how all those tunes fit in to the massive, multilayered story that makes up FF6 is way beyond the scope of a single post. So I’ve decided to let the music speak for itself, since the OC Remix community has made their work available for free. I’ve picked three tracks from Balance and Ruin that show how the music has really inspired the creation of solid art.

First, Ascension of a Madman, based on the anthem of the game’s villain.

You can just feel the insanity bursting out, right? Here’s something a little more upbeat to help settle down those brainwaves. Don’t ask why it’s called Train Suplex. It would take too long to explain.

So those two tracks are peppy and fairly fast paced. But one of the most famous, most artistic moments in FF6 is the opera sequence. You understand what I mean if you’ve played it and if you haven’t, well, my explaining it won’t help you. So I’ll let Jillian Aversa try it for me. Seriously, if you can listen to this and not hear art you have no soul and should spend more time getting that fixed and less time talking about what is or is not art.

If you’re interested in finding and listening to the whole album the OC Remix community page for it is here: http://ocremix.org/album/46/final-fantasy-vi-balance-and-ruin

Thunder Clap: A Brief Cooldown

Posted by natechen on September 29, 2014

Helix

The city streets were oddly empty, even for the time of night. It was well after midnight when Samson and I set out from the venue and struck across town. I’d been expecting less traffic, given the power outage and the hour of the night, and we did pass a another car going the opposite direction every thirty seconds or so, but for the size of the city that struck me as far too few.

I thought about mentioning it to Samson but he was staring out the window. I could tell he was still a little hot under the collar – figuratively, not literally – but I wasn’t sure how to broach the topic. Even after working together for nearly two years, I didn’t know the man well. Samson worked with rehabilitating talents guilty of minor offenses. I leaned more towards catching the ones with delusions of grandeur with a small helping of policy advising on the side.

That didn’t mean I didn’t know what his problem was.

“Izzy is as ready for field work as anyone ever is, Samson,” was what I finally settled on saying as we turned onto the highway and I became less concerned with watching side streets. Given how quiet it was I glanced away from the road long enough to try and read the other man but he was still staring out the window. “Massif is there and he’s got almost as much field experience as I do. She’s gotten way more practical training than any of us ever did, since she can do it out in the open and crosstrain with the police. She’ll be-”

“Helix,when you have kids of your own, you’re going to be very embarrassed about this conversation.”

I gave him a confused look but he was still staring out at the streets. “Is this the voice of experience talking?”

Samson gave a rueful laugh and finally turned away from the window. “It sure is. The tactical chief I had the year before I retired was worried about his son joining the police and I told him that he’d probably be safer there than working with us.”

“Were you right?” I asked, aware that the odds pretty much went the other way.

“His son has been shot at twice and probably stared down a dozen knives but he’s only been hospitalized for bruises and cuts from fistfights, so he’s been blessed more than most.” Samson shrugged. “I guess men with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility shouldn’t be surprised when our children follow in our footsteps.”

“Grandpa Wake would say you can’t ever have too much responsibility so long as it’s used in the right way.”

There was a short, comfortable silence in the car, then Samson asked, “Why did your grandpa retire, Helix? I always wondered, back when I joined. It would have been nice to have him there in person to learn from for a while, not just the first few days.”

I glanced at him in surprise. “You met Grandpa?”

He nodded. “Back when I was a troublemaker, not a peacemaker, Project Sumter brought me in and the Sergeant was there to keep an eye on me until Michael was confident I wouldn’t cause any further problems. He was a frightening man, in his own way.”

“What, did he lose his temper and break something?”

“Age makes a difference for us, Helix. It’s not like we’re actually limited by this.” He slapped a hand to his forty inch waist. There was a slight shockwave, he had enough of a gut for that, but I knew that most of it was muscle. There was a theory around that taxmen actually stored their borrowed entropy in muscle and that was why they could pack it on so easily compared to most. Samson laughed and added, “I met this one ex-K-”

He stopped abruptly and shook his head. “Never mind. What I’m trying to say is, these days cellphones, cars and light bulbs alone put out more power than a taxman could hope to use in a lifetime. There wasn’t as much technology when I was a stupid kid but there was more than enough that I could throw a bus at the agents who came to pick me up. Imagine my surprise when I met a man who I was sure could throw that same bus into orbit.”

“Orbit?” I looked away from the road longer than was strictly safe. We didn’t crash only because there wasn’t much on the road to crash into.

“You didn’t realize?” Samson asked, honestly curious.

“What he could or could not do with public transportation wasn’t something Grandpa talked about a lot,” I said dryly. “He didn’t say much to me about what he thought he could do, just what he’d done.” A shrug. “He never said why he left Project Sumter but I always felt he and Grandma didn’t like staying there when it had no clear goal. I’m sure he would have come back had war ever broken out with the Soviet Union but the idea of just sitting on standby didn’t sit well with him. Grandpa Wake’s a man of action, even if all that action boils down to is working on the tractor.”

“That’s not surprising, I suppose,” Samson said, leaning back in his seat a bit and letting his eyes droop most of the way closed. “I left for much the same reason. Project Sumter was doing too much cracking down and not enough reaching out. Many young talents just needed help controlling themselves and awareness of the dangers. Instead we tried to scare them into not doing anything at all.”

“The Cold War wasn’t healthy for anyone. We started researching some really freaky things back then. When I’d been with the Project three years I was cleared to read up on the Harvest research.” I cracked my knuckles absently against the steering wheel, watching for the exit we wanted. “Grandma would have thrown a fit if she’d known what they’d done with her ideas.”

“Her ideas?” When I didn’t answer, he needled me a little more. “I never heard of any line of research codenamed Harvest. What did it have to do with your grandmother?”

I shrugged. “During the war she came up with the idea of creating a large scale mild low pressure zone to influence the weather and make it easier for the bomber streams to fly on ’round the clock bombing missions. That’s why her codename is Clear Skies.”

Samson nodded. “I’d heard stories about that.”

“Harvest was research into doing the opposite. I think the name was chosen since it was kinder than the alternative.”

There was a moment of silence, then I heard a sharp intake of breath. “You mean reap. As in reaping the whirlwind. They wanted to make bad weather instead of good weather?”

“Bingo.”

“Why?”

Another shrug. “Making storm systems on demand would be a great way to interfere with spy satellites, slow the progress of armies in the field, even cause artificial droughts and famines if you really felt mean. The ultimate goal was to make artificial tornadoes, although they never even built a theoretical model for that.”

Samson sat up straight again at the mention of tornadoes. “How much of the rest can we do?”

“None of it.” I said it with real satisfaction. I wouldn’t stop being a heat sink for anything but I didn’t like the idea that someone could make a desert just because they hated the rain and chased it off whenever it came near. “Even the most basic weather manipulating formulas they came up with never worked in practice. Too many variables, or something. Research was stopped almost forty years ago, although there are one or two people out there who periodically suggest starting it again.”

“I suppose you could use that kind of ability to end droughts as easily as cause them,” Samson mused. “Or pull hurricanes into landfall in the least damaging place possible.”

“I’m not saying there aren’t good uses for the idea,” I said quickly. “I just don’t think the Project Sumter I used to work for was prepared to use the ideas in good ways. I hate to admit it but some of what Circuit’s forced us to do has been for the better. Any transparency at all would have been an improvement and he sure forced a lot of it on us. But his methods are a- What’s that?”

Coming around a curve in the highway I could see at least half a dozen vehicles stopped in odd positions across the highway. Almost as soon as I saw them the steering wheel went stiff and unresponsive under my hands and I stopped talking to focus on keeping the vehicle under control. The dashboard was dark and the engine wasn’t running. Samson jerked forward in his seat, scanning in all directions in case there was a surprise waiting for us somewhere out there, and asked, “What happened? EMP?”

“I think so.” The car kept going under the influence of momentum but I stepped on the brakes and aimed for the side of the road. “Looks like Circuit’s been working on cutting off the highways as a way to get around.”

“It certainly explains why we’ve seen so few cars out,” Samson agreed.

“On the bright side that means he wasn’t deliberately targeting us this time, probably just hitting every car that comes past. No doubt using satellites to spot them, although I wonder how the EMP is being delivered.”

Once I got the car mostly out of the road I put it in park, we climbed out and Samson picked up the car and moved it so that there was no chance of some other out of control driver crashing into it. I could see a few people who had been milling about the other stalled cars gawking at us but ignored them. Not having to keep a low profile all the time was nice in more ways than one.

With the car out of the way Samson dusted off his hands and said, “Are you really sure you want to do this?”

“Well, it’s not going to be fun for either of us from what I understand.” I started limbering up my legs a bit as I spoke. “But if we don’t do it then we’ve kind of defeated the point of your coming along with me, instead of staying with the others at the convert venue.”

He sighed and carefully lowered himself down onto one knee, wincing slightly in the process. “You’d better climb up, then.”

A few seconds later I was up on his back and we left the gawkers and Circuit’s impromptu roadblock far behind.

——–

Izzy

“So do we just sit here and keep an eye on things or do we wait for Helix to give new marching orders?” Jane and I were out on the street with Clark, watching the last of the audience from the evening’s abbreviated concert go trickling out the doors.

“Right now Circuit – or whoever – knows where we are,” Clark said, absently twirling the tire iron that Jane had recently brought in around by the socket. “Staying here doesn’t gain us anything, not even doubt about what we might be doing. This was a well publicized concert. Odds are good we’re under surveillance by Circuit already.”

“Creepy,” I muttered.

“I know, right?” Jane sighed. “So we’re just amusing Mr. Voyeur if we hang around here.”

“That’s a great way to put it.” Meaning it wasn’t.

“Sorry, Izzy, I call it like it is.” Jane folded her arms and proceeded to lavish a death glare on the surrounding skyline. “We need to get out there and figure out to undo whatever he did.”

“It would be easiest to just go to his tower and drag him out for a good spanking,” I said. “If your house is covered in webs the fastest way to deal with it is to kill the spider.”

Clark slung his tire iron over one shoulder and shook his head. “Not to brag but I’ve done field work for a year or so now and, in my experience, the oldschool field agents got where they are because they showed a good deal of caution. We may need to go after Circuit and shut down his operation but we’re supposed to do that while trying to minimize the impact he has on the general populace. And minimizing impact means we need to know what impact Circuit is trying to make and how he’s making it.”

“Yeah?” Jane planted hands on hips and gave him a skeptical look. “Speaking of the General Public, I thought we weren’t supposed to be waving tire irons in the air around them?”

“Is that so?” He made a show of looking around the street, which was now pretty much empty. “It’s a good thing they can’t see me, then, isn’t it?”

Jane was obviously winding up for some kind of retort, she would keep going like this all night if we let her, so I stepped in and said, “Well, Massif is in charge of our half of the show so why don’t we go and see what he wants to do now? Maybe he and Lincoln have thought of a good place we can move to, so at least we’ll be out from under Circuit’s eyes.”

“I still think he ought to give me the tire iron back,” Jane sulked.

“Clark doesn’t have a sidearm with him or any kind of talent,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “I think we can stray from what’s normally advisable a little bit.”

“I’m glad one of them sees reason,” Clark said under his breath.

“I heard that!” Jane snapped.

I managed to get the two of them out of the street and back inside without incident. Almost as soon as we were back in the lobby Amp’s disembodied voice said, “Good timing. Get backstage, Massif is rounding up the team.”

Once Jane and I got over near heart attacks – I’ll never get used to the way she does that – I asked, “What’s he planning on?”

“Well the idea is that he’ll tell us the details once we’re all there so neither of us goes hoarse with all the talking.” The sarcasm came through loud and clear, Amp’s got one of the most expressive voices I’ve ever heard. But that just made it easier to hear the contained excitement behind the sarcasm too. “From the sounds of it, though, we’re going to go out and beat Circuit like he’s a redheaded step-child.”

“Alright!” Jane punched a fist in the air and gave Clark a triumphant look. “That sounds like my kind of plan!”

Clark nodded resignedly. “It sounds like someone’s in for a world of hurt. Let’s just hope it’s not us.”

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Worldbuilding: Deep Space Terminology, An Overview

Posted by natechen on September 26, 2014

World building is a complex and demanding process. I’m not an expert on it but it is fun to share all that work from time to time and for me, one of the things that means is sharing the dictionaries and lexicons that start to accrue over time as I write stories and come up with new concepts.

This week’s world building log is on The Divided Futures, a series of stories about humanities future and what kinds of challenges it’s going to come up with for itself. Specifically, here are some common terms from the Extrasolar age, the age of interstellar colonization and increasingly difficult national relations. Terms like:

biocomputer – A kind of upgrade to the human brain that works in two ways. First, it allows the human brain to enter a state similar to the fight-or-flight reaction people already possess. They experience time and a much slower relative speed, usually seeing things moving at one half or one quarter the normal rate. Digital computers can also coopt the incredible processing power of the brain to carry out their calculations with, sending the person who’s brain serves as the biocomputer into a sensory deprivation state. The most invasive versions of this technology allow people to experience time at 32x – they perceive time at 1/32nd normal rate – and function as the core of incredibly powerful processing engines. But the human brain cannot adapt to the most advanced forms of this technology past a certain age. This used to be around the age of twenty but, as the changes biocomputers impose on brain matter and function grow more and more pronounced, that age has fallen to fifteen.

cetacean ballet – The term for large space vessels moving in precise patterns via tesseract technology (see below). It generally refers to either the traffic patterns of large passenger or freight ships around a spaceport or the movements of large war vessels engaged in a pitched battle.

CMD – Stands for Cochran Mass Drivers. It’s an unofficial unit of measurement for mass driver technology that still finds widespread use in U.S., Russian and Chinese colonies. One CMD is equal to the amount of mass the Cochran mass driver on Mars can launch from the surface of the planet into orbit in a single firing. Because of it’s age the Cochran mass driver tends to be pretty weak by modern standards and most colonies have local planet to orbit launching systems that average 2-4 CMDs per firing. Constant retooling and upgrading by the Cochran Foundation means that the value of the CMD is almost always in flux, which is just one reason why it’s not an officially recognized unit of measurement.

CODSpace – Slang term for the U.S. Combined Orbital/Deep Space forces (see below), primarily used by other branches of the U.S. armed forces or English speaking foreign militarizes.

ComODS – Slang term for the U.S. Combined Orbital/Deep Space forces (see below), primarily used by people within that branch of service and the media.

downwell – Refers to moving towards the center of a gravity well or magnetic field. Usually attached to a descriptor if there are multiple large gravity wells or magnetic sources in the area. “Downwell Jupiter,” for example, means, “I am moving towards the surface of Jupiter” as opposed to towards one of the gas giant’s major moons. The opposite of upwell (see below).

Exo – Pronounced like the letters “X” and “O”. This refers to an atmospherically sealed suit built around a self propelled exoskeleton that allows people to move and work more effectively in super low pressure environments. They range from simple exoskeletons that give a person enough strength to move components massing twice as much as they do to complex armored weapons of war used by soldiers in low microgravity combat.

hash – Refers to an area where gravity’s effect on spacetime distorts it to the extent a tesseract drive can no longer create folded space. This is usually found in the center of a gravity well such as that created by a planet or a Hawking reactor (see below). Gets its name from the way the relevant space is hashed out on most realtime space charts.

Hawking reactor – A method of generating power created some sixty years ago and widely accepted by humanity, a Hawking reactor uses Unified Field Theory to create a microscopic flux in spacetime – essentially creating a miniature black hole. It then harvests the resulting Hawking radiation to create power. Physicists assure the public that black hole evaporation will prevent these singularities from ever becoming true black holes and that they vanish even if the reactor is not shut down safely, but some people view them with a large measure of distrust regardless.

McGee – US ComODS slang for microgravity (see below).

MGI – MicroGravity Infantry, refers to a ComODS branch that specializes in fighting ship to ship, repelling boarders, boarding and seizing hostile ships and making space to planet assaults. The last doesn’t technically take place in microgravity but the name still makes more sense as calling a fighting force in space Marines…

microgravity – Refers to regions of space where no large stellar object, like a planet or a moon, is close enough to produce gravity noticeable to humans. The effects of an object’s gravity never really disappear, they just become so minuscule as to be meaningless, hence the term microgravity is usually preferred to zero gravity, even though they are functionally the same in most cases.

rad cloud – The heavily concentration of stars near the galactic center, a place widely considered too dangerous for exploratory work, much less colonization.

spacetime – Refers to a mathematical construct that unifies space and time for the ease of higher mathematical functions.

tesseract drive – A method of “propulsion” that folds two distant points in spacetime together and allows a vessel to pass from one to the other in effectively no time at all. The “speed” a space vessel can reach is only determined by how much distance can be covered in a single folding of spacetime and how quickly its generators can recharge the drive and repeat the process. Tesseract drives have existed for nearly one and a half centuries but that doesn’t mean they’re trusted technology. The fact that process of folding spacetime leaves it distorted for several minutes or even hours afterward, to the point that a ship cannot tesser again until it “clears it’s own hash (see above),” is frequently used as an argument that the technology might be permanently damaging spacetime in ways not yet understood.

Unified Field Theory – Often shortened to UFT. A mathematical system that has succeeded in relating three of the four “universal forces” in quantum physics, namely gravity, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. The strong nuclear force continues to resist physicists efforts to bring it into the theory with the other three. UFT serves as the foundation for many modern technologies, including artificial gravity, tesseract drives and the Hawking reactors that feed it all.

United States Combined Orbital/Deep Space Forces – The branch of the U.S. Military charged with securing the spacelanes and defending U.S. Exoplanetary States and Territories from foreign threats. Considers itself the most powerful vacuum-ready fighting force in existence, although the British and Indian space arms both have their own thoughts on that.

upwell – Refers to moving away from the center of a gravity well or magnetic field. Usually attached to a descriptor if there are multiple large gravity wells or magnetic sources in the area. “Upwell Jupiter,” for example, means, “I am moving away from the surface of Jupiter” as opposed to away from one of the gas giant’s major moons. The opposite of downwell (see above).

So there you go. You’re probably not ready to jump in and navigate the space lanes just yet, but at least if you wind up frozen in a block of ice and get thawed out three hundred years in the future you’ll be prepared to talk the talk, if not walk the walk. Best of luck!

Cool Things: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars

Posted by natechen on September 24, 2014

That immortal bard, Shakespeare, is possibly one of the single best known playwrights in the world. So what would it be like if he had tried his hand at writing science fiction? That’s the question Ian Doescher seeks to answer with his William Shakespeare’s Star Wars trilogy. Verily, A New Hope, The Empire Striketh Back and The Jedi Doth Return are three gleeful, tongue in cheek romps through the twin mythos of Shakespeare and Lucas, blending thoughtful soliloquies with starfighter action in a weird but fun reminder that there really are no new stories, just new takes on them.

This trilogy has plenty to love, from the irreverent twisting of old soliloquies to new circumstances to hilarious illustrations of how the play might be staged, these books are love letters to both sets of source material and a reminder that we love stories best when we enjoy them. Doescher does a great job both painting the movie characters and scenes we know so well while letting the format of Elizabethan theater give further insight into characters that the franchise, due to it’s early limits, explored in other media or the eventual prequels.

You can do a lot with these texts. Obviously, you can just read them, and believe me that’s a lot of fun. But you can also get together with a dozen friends or so and have a hilarious night doing a dramatic reading of them. I did this about a month ago and it was incredible fun. In this way you, like the people of most times up until a hundred years ago, can make your own entertainment and participate in the process, things modern entertainment rarely allows for.

You might even explore staging these shows, although between the difficulties of staging, costuming and finding a large enough cast, to say nothing of the legal challenges inherent in messing with someone else’s IP (especially one as big as Star Wars) make this a daunting prospect..

But most of all these scripts are interesting for what they say about the stories themselves. The timelessness of the characters far surpass the language or the medium used to convey them to us. That’s one of the reasons great art has such enduring qualities, why people are motivated to try and marry such diverse concepts as Shakespeare and Star Wars in the first place.

A careful reading of these texts, especially in comparison with the movies that inspired them, say a lot about the structure of story and relatable characters. Just try not to do it while you’re eating unless you want to spray food all over your kitchen table.

It’s a real hazard, believe me.

Whatever you do, should you choose to peruse these strange yet familiar texts, enjoy yourself. Even the best of these kind are but shadows, after all…

Thunder Clap: Bad Company, Stranger Characters

Posted by natechen on September 22, 2014

The straps holding him into his wheelchair were very sturdy. Nothing short of a chainsaw would be getting him out of the chair until they were removed. The wheels were firmly locked in place by the clamps in the floor of the van. Matthew Sykes leaned back in the chair and did his best to get comfortable. At the very least, that was one thing wheelchairs had in their favor – they were intended for people who spent a long time in them.

The stress ate at him for a while, inevitable considering his circumstances, but mostly he worried about his wife and whether she’d met her guards or made her flight rather than his immediate circumstances. He’d never been the worrying kind, business wasn’t kind to those who couldn’t have confidence in their decisions, but the situation he was in was unique, and not directly a result of his own decisions. But even with all the stress he was under, certain facts, like being woken up very early, were inescapable. As the van roared to life and started towards it’s destination a gentle sloshing sound from one side of the van slowly lulled him to sleep.

Sykes woke to the sound of a low flying jet coming in through the back door, currently open to allow the big man from earlier and a new friend of his to wrestle a second wheelchair into the back of the van. It took only a few minutes for them to clamp it in place and tumble out the back. They were silent during the whole process and Sykes saw little point in talking to them.

And the van’s new occupant was doing plenty of talking for everyone, laughing and joking about the wild living of young people these days. He sounded almost like a stereotype of a ninety year old man, his voice gone a little high and wheezy, and he was speaking with an odd rhythm that suggested he was a little short of breath. Sure enough, as the men who’d brought him in moved away Sykes could see that there was an oxygen tank attached to his chair and tubes running up to his nose.

The man’s obvious infirmities didn’t seem to have handicapped his voice or good humor, though. Once he was in place and the back door was closed again, leaving them alone in the relative darkness of the early hour, the old man turned to Sykes, a glint on his glasses the only sign of the motion, and said, “Well, son, what brings you here this time of night? Most respectable men are still asleep right now.”

“I couldn’t really say,” Sykes said, rubbing absently at gritty eyes. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Oh, six thirty, I would guess,” was the answer. “I’m surprised you don’t know. Didn’t you fly in?”

“No,” Sykes answered quickly and decisively. After a moment’s uncomfortable silence he added, “I tried learning to fly once. I don’t trust myself on planes now.”

The old man gave a huff that might have been a laugh. “That why a man your age is in that chair? It doesn’t suit to run from the things that weakened you.”

“I’ve lost four parents in this life, to suicide, drugs and airplanes.” Sykes shrugged, more uncomfortable by the moment. “It’s a short enough list of things to avoid, and not likely to get any longer.”

Another awkward silence. “Sorry, son. That was rude of me. I think I’m loosing my touch.”

“No worries,” Sykes said, the ghost of a smile on his face. “I’ve made my peace long ago.”

“Still, it begs the question,” the old man said. “If you didn’t fly in, and I didn’t, why are we at an airport?”

“I don’t think we’re going to learn that any time soon.” Sykes looked his companion over again. It was hard to tell in the light but he really didn’t look like anything other than an infirm old man. “Speaking of obvious questions, what brings you here?”

The gleam of the old man’s smile was back. “Me? Old Stillwater just couldn’t pass on the chance to get back in the field. If I don’t keep my hand in the game I’ll keel over and die. What about you?”

“I suppose…” Sykes trailed off and tried his best to sort through the possible answers to that question. “I suppose I’m paying for my sins.”

“As good a reason as any. Poor choices or poor friends?”

Sykes chuckled ruefully. “You can’t have the second without the first. But in my case, I think it was mostly bad friends.”

“Poor choices are easier to straighten out, poor friends tend to fight back,” Stillwater said. “My sympathies. Had a few friends that didn’t get on with reason in my time.”

“Just a few? I’d think a man your age would have had more friends than that.”

The old man laughed. “Okay, more than a few. But only a few that really went off course. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems – it isn’t always.”

“No,” Sykes said softly. “I’m pretty sure it’s bad.”

“You’ll just have to be better then.”

Sykes narrowed his eyes, trying to make out the old man’s expression in the dim light of the van. He didn’t sound insincere. “What do you expect me to do under these circumstances?”

“For starters you can get your mind on the problem.” Not insincere but definitely annoyed. “I know you got a life outside this van, but I served on ships full of guys that had lives outside the hull. When you spend your whole shift on the sonar, listening for the Kraut U-boats coming for you, there’s nothing you can do but listen and think. So you learn to plan ahead and good. Who do you talk to as soon as you hear the screws in the water? How fast can helm be notified of incoming torpedoes? What do you need to do to light a fire under whatever needs burning?”

“You must have been a real terror to your ratings.” Sykes shook his head. “Still, you do have a point. What-”

The back doors of the van swung open again, cutting off his next question. “Alright, it looks like everyone is here.” There were two new people at the back of the van. The speaker had a smooth, cultured voice and the clean, elegant cut of his suit could be made out beyond the harsh glare of parking lot lighting behind him. “I was caught a bit unawares and I do apologize. However, now that everyone is here I suppose we can set things in motion.”

He turned to the other new person, a tall, African-American woman who looked like she’d fit better in a Greek myth than modern America. Her long, tan vest covered a shapely figure from shoulder to knee and her charcoal clothes were accessorized with paracord and a host of indistinct but dangerous looking equipment. The man handed her a slip of paper and said, “If you’d care to get behind the wheel, this is a list of your destinations. I’ve already spoken to the rest, they know where they’re going and where to get off. Your instructions are on the next page. Don’t read them until you reach your final destination.”

The woman took the papers hesitantly. “What about you?”

“As always, I have my own business to attend to. You take care of yours and this will all end as planned.” The well dressed man clapped his hands together and said, “I suppose we should get on our way. Good luck and stay out of trouble. At least, until it’s time for you to cause it. Then you can do as you like.”

The two men from earlier climbed into the back of the van and pulled the doors closed behind them, then found seats on some crates strapped into the back corners of the van. There were no real chairs, although the brief illumination while the doors were open was enough to see that something had been bolted along one side of the van at some point. A half a dozen tanks about the size of fire extinguishers strapped down along the opposite side was the source of the sloshing sound heard when the vehicle was in motion.

While one of the two men was the man who’d come to Sykes’ door earlier in the day, the other was a strange, nondescript man with brown hair and an athletic build. Sykes frowned. “Who are you?”

Stillwater answered. “That’s my tactical agent. It’s been a while since I did field work, but when talents came out of the woodwork a while ago Sumter thought I should have someone to keep me out of trouble.”

“You mean this doesn’t qualify?” Sykes asked, incredulous.

“This is the definition of trouble,” the brown haired man answered. “But it’s also the biggest chance a guy like me gets. Chief Stillwater wasn’t the only one who couldn’t pass on the chance.” He broke into a grin. “We’re on our way to catch the biggest criminal Project Sumter has ever let get away.”

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Genrely Speaking: Thrillers

Posted by natechen on September 19, 2014

Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, where we discuss what we mean when we reference genres in discussions at Nate Chen Publications. While others may disagree with the way genres are defined here they’re often so poorly defined as to be open to a great deal of interpretation, one of the reasons why I started this little feature in the first place.

Today’s topic is thrillers, a characteristic genre, and one that’s become more and more popular as modern storytelling techniques have evolved. Thrillers need almost no introduction as we’ve all seen or read more than one or two, but in addition to defining the goal of Genrely Speaking is to analyze and help develop a deeper appreciation for what genres have to offer writers. So let’s take a look at this popular genre, shall we?

Thrillers deal with immediate and visceral threats to the wellbeing of the central character. Which is to say, they are always games of life and death. Whether it’s the life of the central character or someone they care about or the lives of everyone in a city or planet, thrillers are always playing for keeps. They offer simple, straight forward threats to the protagonist even though the solutions to those problems are almost never simple.
Thrillers feature focused and tense pacing that leaves the audience little time to see far beyond the immediate danger to the character. While the narrative still varies it’s pacing (at least in well constructed thrillers) it never really lets the audience forget that the characters are facing dire threats. There may be romantic or comedic interludes but the threat to the characters is always nagging away in the back of the audience’s mind. Incidentally this is a major reason so many thrillers impose time limits of some sort on their protagonists. It helps give the narrative that urgency.
Thrillers keep the audience guessing. Whether it’s about how the characters will pull off what they’re planning, or how their plan will go wrong, or who the traitor in the group is, every thriller has at least one mystery that will persist through ninety percent of the story, from very early on until the very climax of the narrative. While every story has some kind of mystery to it thrillers need big, attention grabbing ones that will hold an audience for the bulk of the time they’re engaged.

What are the weaknesses of thrillers? Well, for starters they’re really popular and they engage well with human psychology so a lot of them tend to get made and that creates two problems. First, originality starts to dwindle quickly. A successful thriller gets made and people follow the pack. That happens to an extent with any kind of success and not just in writing or entertainment. The bigger problem, for writers, is that in thrillers it’s the execution that makes them great and not the characters or the trappings of the plot. Unfortunately when people knock off thrillers they tend to copy the characters or the plot and not deliver the tight, gripping pacing needed to really make a thriller work. They bungle foreshadowing and ruin the mystery, fail to make the danger to the protagonists feel imminent or just can’t get the pacing right and everything feels off.

Second, thrillers are vulnerable to fridge logic – even very good writers can get so caught up in the excitement of their story they don’t see plot holes coming or, worse, they cross their fingers and hope the audience won’t notice. In the Internet age that’s a pipe dream. Discovering you accidentally gutted your magnum opus with a stray plot thread is no fun but it won’t be nearly as bad as the roasting your audience will give you when they catch you out on it. Always write with care, but that goes double for thrillers.

What are the strengths of thrillers? If one of the greatest weaknesses of thrillers is fridge logic and fridge horrors one of their greatest strengths is fridge brilliance. The moment when your audience is frying up eggs and suddenly clicks together all the little hints you left behind in your story and realizes, “Oh, he was the protagonist’s father!” Or, “That dirty information broker was playing both sides!” Or even, “She was in love with him and that’s why she sacrificed herself!”

Of course many thrillers won’t trust their audiences that far and will just brain them over the head with whatever thing the author wants them to walk away with. But when a creator takes the time and care to hide all the clues but makes sure that you’re too wrapped up in the main story to pick up on them the moment of realization after the fact almost always as much greater impact than simply having it spelled out in the story for you.

Of course the ultimate strength of a thriller is it’s ability to grab the audience and run with them. It’s human nature to want to know, it’s human nature to empathize and it’s human nature to want to come out on top. By giving us a protagonist who feel a very visceral threat we can empathize with, who we want to see come out on top, and then keep us guessing as to how it all happens, the thriller offers a solid formula for keeping the audience with you every step of the way. You have to execute the formula correctly, but then that’s true of any set of instructions. In short, the thriller is just plain good at getting and keeping your audience.

At first glance thrillers do not feel terribly exotic, although that is in no small part because they tend to stand on their own rather than be combined with an aesthetic genre. Part of that is simply because the pacing makes the world building aesthetic genres want much harder to do. But also, aesthetic genres tend to put a little more emphasis on characters and plot elements, things thrillers don’t particularly need to be effective.

But that doesn’t mean the thriller is a narrow genre. On the contrary, no other genre demands more from the author in terms of pacing and careful plot construction. Studying thrillers carefully will help you to master those aspects better and maybe one day you’ll be able to blend a thriller with your favorite aesthetic and make a new genre of your own.

Cool Things: Maximum Overdrive

Posted by natechen on September 17, 2014

Try to imagine, if you would, what would happen if you had a pair of Klingons who had been raised their whole life by Vikings in the tradition of Nordic myth and then learned to speak English and play the electric guitar. Time travel would obviously be involved and I’m not sure it wasn’t a part of what created Dragonforce, one of England’s more recent rock exports to the world at large. At the very least it would certainly explain a lot.

Dragonforce, for those of you not familiar with the band, is a British power metal group, formed near the end of the last millennium and founded on the guitar sounds created by their two lead players, Herman Li and Sam Totman. These two men have one goal in life, namely to play the guitar as fast as is humanly possible. They are very, very good at it. In fact, they may very well be the best in the world.

That said, Dragonforce’s early discography has some notable weaknesses. It’s been said that they basically only play two songs, a power ballad and a sort of upbeat power metal. It’s hard to argue with that – a lot of their songs on their early albums are very similar and most of the rest border on identical. Listening to their sophomore album, Sonic Firestorm, is a lot like listening to a single, hour long track. On the other hand, that album has some if their defining songs on it and the music is good, it just sometimes feels like it’s overstaying its welcome. And for a band noted for routinely cranking out tracks six to eight minutes long a focus on epic scope is kind of to be expected.

The lyrics on those albums are not anything impressive. It’s laced with fantasy imagery and largely focuses on bloody conflict and overcoming it by courage and determination. While having the grit to face such dire challenges is an important thing to strive for and the musical style Dragonforce embraces certainly goes along with such themes, there’s nothing else there on those early albums. It’s pure escapism.

This technically brings us to The Power Within (2012), Dragonforce’s second most recent album, where the band began to show more variation both lyrically and musically. However this post is mostly about Maximum Overdrive (2014), which came out about a month ago and most of what I’ve got to say applies to both albums so let’s skip to the present.

First, Maximum Overdrive has about five different musical aesthetics, four if you remove their cover of “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. This gives the album a little more musical diversity than earlier albums, which is definitely welcome. Now it’s not to say that Totman and Li’s fascination with fast guitar playing is bad. Quite the contrary, that’s the band’s claim to fame and something you really can’t get anywhere else. But a little variation in how it’s delivered is good.

Second, the band’s lyrical depth has been growing. If you get the Special Edition album off of Amazon it comes with a total of fifteen tracks, three of which are stark departures from the usual lyrical themes. “City of Gold” focuses on a young girl who’s left home to try and make it in Hollywood only to find herself homeless instead. “Extraction Zone” examines the difficulties of video game addiction and what might drive a person to it (a theme already explored some in “Give Me the Night” on The Power Within although that song is about drug addiction.) Finally, “You’re Not Alone” is a powerful song about recovering from grief after the death of a loved one.

Quite a difference from old songs that were basically The Ring of Nibelung set to electric guitar (not there’s anything wrong with that.) All the songs still offer a perspective about overcoming extreme difficulty to gain great reward, which goes nicely with Dragonforce’s musical style, and it is nice to hear that the band thinks that’s as much a part of the real world as it is the myths and legends the band clearly loves so much.

Dragonforce is not a musical experience for everyone. But it is a must for fans of excellent guitar technique and inspiring music.

Thunder Clap: Shocking Claims

Posted by natechen on September 15, 2014

Helix

“Your city?” Not for the first time Circuit managed to shock me with his audacity. “Does the city know that? I think they might have other ideas.”

Circuit laughed. “Cities have never had any real choice in who owns them, Helix. You know that. They are in the hands of those who can manipulate them properly, and in this day and age that’s me. Consider this a courtesy call.”

I looked down at the line of unconscious people at my feet, then back up at the camera. “What courtesy exactly am I supposed to be expecting? Because so far it’s not looking inviting.”

“Yes, I am glad you are the one who found them. It saves the trouble of having some hapless passerby try and run you down – or worse, having the police do it.” He steepled his fingers and cocked his hat slightly so I could make out a single eye gleaming at me from underneath the brim. “This is my notice to you that this city is now under my protection.”

“Your… protection?” I glanced at Teresa, hoping she had some better idea what was going on. She just gave me a blank looked, followed by a shrug that suggested that I was the expert on Circuit’s thought processes and I should figure it out for myself. So I said, “How does knocking out the city’s power grid count as protection, again? Or is this a kind of racketeering scheme? The city pays you or no power?”

“Nonsense. I’m talking about the kind of protection you can’t provide.” Circuit spun around to face the windows and gestured out the window at the city below him. “Do you really think anyone’s ever done an adequate job of protecting all that? The police? The FBI? You? Of course not.”

I did my best to keep a smile from my face. “And your knocking out half of the city’s power grid-”

“Three quarters,” he corrected.

“Three quarters,” I said, the humor of the situation quickly draining away. “Your robbing three quarters of the city of it’s power is protecting the people of the city how?”

“Robbing?” Circuit turned his chair just enough to glance back at me. His face wasn’t visible but his tone told me it was his turn to be amused. “No one is entitled to electricity. It’s a convenience only, and one I’m sure people will willingly give up for safety, just like they’ve put up with airport security and End User License Agreements. So long as their precious lives aren’t disrupted, what do they care if they really have freedom? I’m building a world of safety – the world they want. What does it matter if the lights come on when they flip a switch?”

“So who does make that decision? You?” I shook my head sadly. “You’re unbelievably smart, Circuit. I’ll give you that. But even with your talent for reading electric potentials there’s no way you can monitor an entire city’s worth of electricity use – and that’s before we even talk about trying to protect the city.” I put enough emphasis on the word protect to make it clear I thought he was doing the opposite.

“And yet right here in front of you is the evidence to the contrary. It’s just a small start, I’ll admit. But if you were to take the time to look around,” another gesture at the cityscape, ” I’m sure you’d find this little achievement repeated over and over again. All it takes is enough successes like this and soon, surprisingly soon, you’ve created a city where no one would dare step out of line.”

I snorted. “That’s reassuring. So what’s the courtesy call about, again?”

Circuit spun and leaned forward to loom over the camera. Although I got a clearer look at his face it still wasn’t enough to make out much of it. Enough to give me a strange feeling in my gut, though. I was having a lot of those lately. “The call is to warn you to leave well enough alone, Helix. This is now my city, under my protection. I won’t tolerate you or anyone else trying to do my job here, anymore than you tolerate vigilantes in your territory, interfering with your job. It’s time for you to step down and let a real expert do the job.”

“You realize that, even though you do have a lot of experience working with criminals, you still kind of count as one yourself?” I folded my arms and added as an afterthought, “Or a vigilante. Or both.”

“History will prove which of our opinions is right, I think.” Circuit leaned back in his chair and pointed a finger at me. “I’ve given you fair warning. Leave or face the consequences.”

He twitched his finger once, like he was pushing an invisible button, and the TV switched off. I glanced back at Teresa and we quickly stepped off to one side of the display window, huddling up with Gearshift, who was quickly tapping the screen of his smartphone.

“How much did you record?” I asked in a soft voice, sure that Circuit could still eavesdrop on us even if we couldn’t see him.

“I didn’t get the first ten seconds or so,” he said. “And I had a bad angle so I don’t know how much of the visuals are going to be of use. But we’ve got all the audio.”

I gave him a slap on the back. “Well done. Lets-”

The screen of his phone suddenly went dark. We all stared at it for a few seconds then Teresa dug her phone out of a pocket as I felt a headache coming on. A second later Teresa said, “I think we’ve been EMPed.”

Gearshift cursed viciously. From the look of the case and the cleanliness of the screen I was guessing it was a new phone. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Most insurance policies consider destruction by malicious terrorist adequate reason for replacement.”

“I guess.” He stared at it for a second then shook his head. “Fastest I’ve ever had one of these turn into a paperweight, though.”

“Hang on to it,” Teresa said, matching actions to words by putting her own back in her pocket. “There’s a chance Forensics can recover some of the data on it.”

I pulled a hand across my face, trying to wipe away all the exhaustion I was suddenly feeling. When I could see again my eye fell on the unconscious people at the base of the window. “Okay, let’s head back to the venue. We need to let everyone else know the score and figure out what we’re doing next. And find someone to grab these poor saps off the street before Circuit remembers to come back and grab them.”

The three of us set off across the city at a fast pace, doing our best to remain alert. I’ll confess to being more than a little distracted, though, with my brain spending a lot more time trying to work out Circuit’s angle this time around than paying attention to what was going on around me. Teresa slowed down a step or two for some reason, I have to confess I’m not sure why, and I nearly ran into her. She glanced back at me and frowned. “You’re making your ‘Circuit is bugging me again’ face, Helix.”

“I don’t have a ‘Circuit is bugging me again’ face. That would be a stupid face to have.” I looked at Gearshift. “I don’t have make that kind of face, do I?”

He held up his hands. “Don’t look at me. This is our first time working together, am I right?”

That was enough for me. “See? The man says I don’t have that kind of face. He would have noticed it by now.”

“He is noticing it, right now,” Teresa said with a laugh. “He’s just scared to admit it.”

“Scared? Of what?”

She shook her head. “Forget it, you’re just trying to change the subject now. Seriously, Helix. What’s wrong? Aside from the obvious.”

I cracked my knuckles absently, trying to figure out what to say next since she’d cut off the easy comeback. “It just doesn’t sit right.”

“What doesn’t?” Gearshift asked.

“Him calling me out.”

“But he did that during the Enchanter business back when I first joined,” Teresa pointed out. “That was another case of him trying to do our job to make a point.”

That was exactly what was bothering me. He had called us out before taking a direct hand in the Enchanter case. “Maybe. But last time the point of contacting us was to give us the chance to work together. Why call us now? He can’t possibly expect us to back off.”

“He does have a weird idea of fair play,” she answered. “Maybe he just feels he has to, in order for things to be done right.”

“Could be. But I’d have expected him to do it before hand, to make his eventual move that much more impressive when it looked like we were powerless to stop it.” I hesitated, a new thought occurring to me. “That’s what’s wrong.”

Teresa and Gearshift both gave me quizzical looks. “What?”

“Wheels within wheels.” I could tell they didn’t get it but instead of explaining I picked up my pace. “Come on. We need to get those looters picked up and back to the venue. I need to talk to an analyst…”

——–

Izzy

“Why does she have a tire iron?” Helix stormed through the backstage area, voice booming much louder than you’d expect for such a small guy. He was talking about Jane, who for some reason still had the tire iron she’d picked up at the shopping plaza in one hand.

“We had a little trouble, Helix,” Al said, getting up from the small cluster of people sitting by the back wall of the venue. “There-”

“No tire irons,” Helix said. “Loose it somewhere.”

Jane and I exchanged a bewildered look but while we were at it Amp gently slipped the tire iron from Jane’s hand and passed it to Clark Movsessian, her drummer, and Clark made it disappear almost like it was magic. Al watched the whole thing impassively and, once the show was over, said, “Done. Want to share what the big issue is?”

“Where are Cheryl and Samson?” Helix asked instead.

“Cheryl was missing when we got back,” Amp answered. “Samson went to try and find her. I heard them talking with the manager a few minutes ago. I think it has something to do with the generator not being enough to keep the full air conditioning system going – you of all people must have noticed how hot it’s getting out there. People in the crowd are going to start passing out soon.”

“Great. Just what I need today.” Helix slumped down onto one of the boxes we’d been using as seats and leaned his head against the wall. “Terrorists are taking over the city while we’re waving tire irons around and letting people pass out.”

Al sat down on the floor next to Helix and said, “So you’ve confirmed the outage was caused maliciously.”

Helix nodded. “I just talked to someone claiming to be Open Circuit, and in complete control of the city. He’s got a nice little view to go with it. He not only spotted us moving around but managed to EMP bomb us and he’s taking out looters and leaving them on doorsteps like he thinks he’s a stork or something.”

“Circuit’s back and he’s worried about a tire iron?” Jane whispered to me.

“Little things. He needs to have the little things because sometimes that’s all he can get,” I whispered back, echoing something my mother had said to me many times.

“Why do you say ‘claiming to be’?” Gearshift asked. “I didn’t see anything to make me think it’s not him.”

Clark shook his head. “If Circuit’s existence was still classified it I’d say that’s enough to assume it’s him. But there were copycats for months after we cracked his last operation. There’s a chance whoever you saw is another one, although if his is he’s doing a lot better job of it than anyone else who tried. Circuit plays big and wiping out the city’s power grid is the closest anyone’s ever come to his level of ambition.”

“Not wiped out – taken over,” Helix clarified. He went over the whole conversation his group had just had with Circuit for us. “And there’s another thing you haven’t considered, Movsessian,” he said when he was done.

“What’s that?” Clark was a field analyst and considering things was his job. He looked a little miffed at the idea that he wasn’t doing it.

“He could be a decoy Circuit set up to distract us. Circuit never directly does whatever it is he wants to do, he’s always juggling multiple things at once – this could just be another gambit to distract us while he does something else. Whatever that is.” Helix pushed away from the wall and pressed his palms into his eye sockets for a moment, then shook his head. “No point tying ourselves into knots over it, though. Amp, I want to talk to the manager. Can you ask him to come over here with Cheryl and Samson?”

She nodded and backed a step or two away from the group, lips moving but not making any sound we could hear. Helix slapped his hands to his knees and gripped them like he was looking for something stable to hang on to. “We’ve got work to do, ladies and gentlemen. For starters, Circuit has a headquarters in the city. Someplace high up, with a view of the lakefront and no similarly high buildings between it and the lake. Teresa, Gearshift, did either of you-”

“Waltham Towers.” Clark said it with such certainty that Helix stopped midrant for a full two seconds.

“I agree,” Lincoln said, piping up from his spot by the wall. “Waltham Towers is the skyscraper closest to the lake. I’ve been in most of the big ones one time or another and you can see the Towers from all of them, most of them have at least one other big building visible from them.”

Helix scratched his head. “Well that’s kind of useful, except we can’t be sure the image we saw was taken from the public observation area of the building, or that it didn’t come from one of the big buildings that didn’t have an observation deck or some such.”

“No. It’s definitely Waltham Towers.” Clark smiled. “You know how the property changed hands about four years ago because the last owners were in trouble financially?”

“How about I take your word for it and you get to the point?” Helix suggested.

“Three guesses who was middleman and did the accompanying remodeling.”

Helix’s eyes narrowed. “Keller Real Estate and Development.” It wasn’t a question. “That must have been a big deal for them.”

“The biggest they ever closed,” Clark confirmed. “It’s not one of the properties we had a special interest in from earlier investigations but when Circuit disappeared we pulled a complete list of everything Keller Realty has worked on and that was at the top of the list.”

“Okay, that is a pretty strong case for that being the center of operations. And if it’s true, it’s another reason to suspect Circuit and not someone else.” Helix looked at Amplifier. “Are they coming?”

“They’ll be here in a minute.”

“Good. That leaves three little things to take care of. Or one big thing, depending on how you look at it.” Helix pulled himself to his feet and dusted his hands off. “Gearshift. Jane. Isabella. You three aren’t cleared for field work yet but we need people on the ground right now and you’re close enough that I’m willing to give you a pass. But I’m not forcing you – if you want to cut out now it won’t look bad on your record. So. Field promotion to active field agent or bow out and wait for another day?”

Jane answered immediately. “No time like the present. I’ve got a bone or two to pick with my ex-boss anyway.”

“I’ve cleared everything but my wall diving certificate anyway,” Gearshift said with a grin. “So long as I don’t try to run straight through a skyscraper we should be okay.”

“So long as you don’t get cocky,” Helix said with a smirk. Then he looked at me. “What about you, Izzy? You’re the youngest here and honestly, from a PR angle, I don’t like the idea of someone under twenty-one out on this.”

“To say nothing of what her father might say?” Papa asked, looming out of the backstage shadows to tower behind Helix.

Helix didn’t even glance back at him. “She’s an adult and I started field work when I was even younger. I’d be something of a hypocrite if I didn’t give her the chance – and that’s something you’re not very enthusiastic about, isn’t it?”

Papa just grunted and looked at me.

Which kind of put me on the spot. I knew my father didn’t want me running around with a supervillain on the loose. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be left out when Jane and Al were risking their necks. But more than anything I hated the thought that someone was willing to cause all this mayhem just to try and prove a point – if this was what it took the point wasn’t worth arguing.

“Don’t let anyone twist your arm into it,” Helix said, sensing my indecision. “If you don’t want to do it you’ll just be a liability.”

I took a deep breath and said, “What if I just want to knock Circuit into the next time zone?”

Helix smirked. “Then you’ll have to get in line. I filed my NBH-186 years ago, that means I get first dibs. Now all three of you need to raise your right hands.” He waited until we did. “You going to do all you can to drag Circuit in and throw him in jail?”

Gearshift said, “Yes.”

Jane and I exchanged an uncertain look and did the same.

“Great. By the powers vested in me, etcetera, etcetera, you’re field agents. Put your hands down, this isn’t an elementary school.”

“Huh.” Gearshift looked at Amp. “That felt kind of anticlimactic.”

“That was pretty ceremonial,” she said with a smirk. “When he made me an acting field agent, last time Circuit went wild, I only got one etcetera.”

“There was only one of you at the time.” Helix waved papa and Cheryl into the circle. “Now listen up, people. Circuit’s one step ahead of us – again. That’s fine. We always have been and we’ve gotten better at winning from there every single time. Here’s what we’re going to do this time.”

Nate Chen Publications

Project Sumter and Other Stories

Author Archives: natechen

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