7 Billion Years BCE

The universe is young and rapidly expanding. Fewer galaxies and a relative handful of bright new stars. Orbiting these closely neighboring stars are a few thousand planets cradling intelligent life.

Solar systems are closer together, and the fabric of the galaxies are lousy with tears– wormholes. Given the speed with which travel is possible between planets and systems, the sentient species sail on solar winds and the tides of space/time.

Question is, do I keep humans as one of these sentient cultures– keeping in the trope of human as touchstone and anchor for the audience– or do I do away entirely with us? Focus on what could be called, from our standpoint, older races?

Want to move away from visual stereotypes of space opera. Definitely a Froudian aesthetic. Imagine The Dark Crystal as a space opera, at least visually. Very organic technology, living ships. Space whales. But not Farscape.  More an age of established empires.  Empires of what we call the Old Gods, now simply the Gods.  The Untenables.  The great, unknowable beings of the Cthulhu Mythos.  Likewise probably Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana, and Carcosa ain’t so lost, and the King in Yellow sits enthroned.  Maybe not directly, but certainly inspired.  If Gaiman can get away with a Lovecraft reference in everything he writes, then so can I, doggammit.

Brain attack

It just sort of happened.  The gun was still smoking, and cordite burned his nostrils.  At least, what he assumed was cordite, it’s not as if he’d ever fired a fucking pistol before.  He stared down at the heavy, smoldering thing in his hand– tarnished silver, black where the grip met his hands and in the moving parts, the hammer, the trigger.  Oh Christ, the trigger.  When I hold you in my arms, and  I feel my finger on your trigger, I know nobody can do me no harm… What a load of bullshit.  There’d be plenty of harm, and more to go around.  Of course, he’d be the only one catching that heat, because there was no one else to take it.  He’d acted alone, that was absolutely true.  It wasn’t as if he’d had a motive, even.  Picked up the gun, and decided to see what it would do to someone.  The curiosity was overwhelming.  Curiosity killed this fucking guy right here.

Now it was just a matter of handling the body.  The two-hundred and eighty-seven pounds of human compost.  He was very afraid he might need an axe.

Thomas Fugit

First off, a disclaimer.  A Google search shows several time-traveling adventurers named “Thomas Fugit”. This Tom is in no way associated or inspired by any of these others, the pun is just too good to pass up.  The combination of electricity-based power (Thomas Edison) and time travel, or fleeing through time, a spin on the phrase Tempus Fugit.  It really works well for this concept.

Thomas Fugit is an electrokinetic.  That is, he controls the eletrical by thought alone.  He doesn’t actually create electricity whole cloth per se, but rather controls the eletricity around him.  This source can be static electricity, 60Hz mains currents, or even the eletrical fields generated by living organisms.

But that’s not even the cool part.

Fugit is also a time traveller.  His ability to skip through time is enabled through a device he recieved from Nikola Tesla– the Temporal Capacitor.  The TC is composed of two pieces– a pocket-watch item of incredible complexity that detects weak points in space/time known as rifts, and an iron-core copper rod nicknamed the Lighting Rod that amplifies Fugit’s power and focuses it into a rift in order to blast it open.  This process is not subtle.  Tesla was unable to make the Capacitor practical, as it requires a ridiculous amount of electrical power to operate.  Being a human dynamo, Thomas Fugit is capable of using the Temporal Capacitor.

Fugit is an adventurer, meaning essentially that he is equal parts thief, crime-fighter, conman, and explorer.  He dresses as one might expect a time traveler to dress– an amalgum of clothes from different eras.  He’s currently quite fond of slim, custom, two-button suits in gray or blue, embroidered waistcoats, Doc Martins, and a snap-brim fedora.

Max Silver pt 2

The Skin, Border Net, Skin Net. The augmented reality network stretched over normal reality.

Borderware. Software involving the Skin, especially the core Graphical User Interfaces.

The plastic hut of the bus stop is acned with epoxy-stuck RFID tags, that would, were Max plugged-in, appear to him as anything from glowing, animated graffitti to full movies projected in three dimensions.  Even the faceless shells jostling around him project their little personal networks onto the Skin.  As it is, Max is lind to all this, and without the panoply of a Bordeware GUI orbiting him, Max is good as invisible to the Crowd.

Max Silver pt 1

What we in the middle 21st consider private life, our precursors would consider crowded living.  A given individual has a bed, the head, and his brain, but that’s about it.  Anything beyond this is considered obscenely extravagant.  Not that this perception is unwarranted, with a planetary population approaching 9 billion, we can’t afford to spare the room.  The metro Atlanta zone is a good example– 50k per square mile.  We’re rivaling Mumbai at the turn.

Instant coffee.  Pretty much always instant coffee.  Not that he’d ever had anything but instant coffee, but the thought of getting caffeinated from something other than shit brown grains dissolved in lukewarm water gave him a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Max pulled down $200 a week for searching, checking, and collating old news media for a handful of low-rent archive sites.  Getting verifiable history out of the Internet was a lot harder than it had at first seemed when he’d taken the gig.  He’d taken to writing in the down time while his agent searched the bowels of the Web for also-ran news stories from the early 00s and turn of the century. Every word he wrote went toward a dissertation on private life in the mid-21st century.  After three months of writing about 3 hours a day, he was around 2,000 words in, and he wasn’t moving any faster right now.  He saved his opus and stared at the raw data blurring through his goggles, and sipped his coffee substitute.  He couldn’t read the binary, but it was far more distracting than the completely unhelpful progress reports from his homegrown search agent.  That’s when the power went out.  His computer ran on an independent power source, but nothing else in his apartment did.  Thirty years ago, the incumbent administration had taken to reworking the energy infrastructure of the country with solar, wind, and bio-fuel sources, but funding wasn’t what was needed, and rolling blackouts and rationing were a fact of life.  He set his edit suite to standby, grabbed his Nokia, slid into his boots and a wrinkled, faded Mucous Membrane tour shirt, and headed out the door.

He walked through the sodden Druid Hills night and across his apartment complex.  The Oaks was near on a century old, and any updating the property owners had done was mostly lashed onto the 1960s architecture rather than integrated. With the population problem bad as it was, most of the older, multi-bedroom apartments had been split up into smaller, single-room units with half-baths, tiny kitchens, common living rooms, and communal showers. Max spent most of his EBT credits at New Odessa– a 24 hour Russian deli two blocks from his front door.  Sure, the beef was third-generation clone-meat, but they made incredible pirozhki out of hydro potatoes without kelp or algae.  Also, he needed a beer and it was one of the few places left in town to get draft.  It was one of the great ironies of the globalized world– real meat was a rarity, but one could snag a Ukrainian beer no problem.

What did it say about the state of the modern human, that, while things like distance and time were dilated and exploded respectively, the basics of life were utterly processed surrogates with very few exceptions.  The deli was the kind of place that defied all but one of these factors.  It was undoubtedly a child of globalization, but the food was mostly real and the pace was pleasant.  It took a few visits a week to keep Max Silver from burning out something fierce.  The worn tread of third-hand hiking boots crunched across glass, gravel, and broken McAdam.  He edged through a hole in the complex’s perimeter fencing, took a soft right turn behind the post office, and strolled up three long flights of outdoor stairs to the high street.  He came out into a broad parking lot, and dodged cars parked mostly for the chart-toppers dance club through to the front door of New Odessa.

The owner’s son, Victor, nodded a greeting, and had a cold Obolon waiting by the time Max got to the counter.  He ordered a couple potato pirozhkis and took a seat toward the back of the dining room.  He tucked into the hot stuffed buns with a reserved appetite, and washed the starch down with a few gulps of honey-smooth lager.  Max was hitting a wall, and he’d seen it coming for several weeks now.  Since March, he’d been using his data mining as an excuse not to write instead of just income.  He felt trapped between his basic physical needs and his desire to exorcise the very real fear he felt at the shrinking world.  He chewed mushy potato and savory bread that tasted like alienation.  He’d heard the phrase “alone in a crowd”, but hadn’t understood what it meant, until now.  Though the deli was maybe a quarter full, he heard no fewer than six languages through the intermittent conversations around him.  Max knew three languages– English, Classical Greek, and Latin.  Those were not in the six he heard tonight.  Leaving wouldn’t have helped, either.  As soon as he stepped outside, he’d be assaulted with Amharic, Spanish, modern Greek, German…

He moved the rest of the food into his mouth and, after chewing, down his throat.  This process was eased by chasing the heavy stuff with beer.  He finished up, settled up, and stepped out into the humidity.  No matter how small the planet got, no matter how diluted culture, one could always rely on the heat and wet of an Atlanta night.  His shirt was already sweat-streaked and sticking to his chest.  He’d clipped his hair incredibly short for just this reason, but the sweat still clung to his scalp since the air was already super saturated and the sweat had nowhere to go.  He knew he saw faces in the small clumps of bodies in the parking lot, but they were washed out.  The club was letting out, and the groups grew more numerous, but all he saw was a mass of skin-tones and body types.  Alone in a crowd.  He wanted to rip the hazy masks from off these wandering silhouettes, wanted to pummel them into recognition, but that would be wrong and foolish besides.  The world may be homogenized, but ethics still existed and he’d likely be jailed for assault regardless.  He put the urge down to a touch of schadenfreude, and headed off across the parking lot, past the stairs, and stayed on the high street, moving toward Clairemont.

He wondered about the time, and a display in the periphery of his right field-of-vision flashed 02:07 for a few seconds.  That was from an implant that controlled the pigment along the edge of his retina.  Simple ASCII display, but it was handy.  It could manage simple shapes  by displaying colored characters in tight formation.  He stepped out of the plaza, up to a MARTA stop, and continued along the avenue, traffic humming along side the sidewalk at 60mph.