"wind boy versus bronze fist" - chapter three of a novel

The force of his punch knocks me flying across the parking lot. Definitely not human. I take a moment, maybe a third of a second, there in midair, to enjoy the simplicity of sensation in flying free for a change. Then I take the pain and feed it into my Power.

A sharp backward flip and I drop straight down, just to show him I can. I can see the indecision behind his eyes, as he tries to figure out whether or not he’s bitten off more than he can chew. I don’t give him the time.

Calling up the winds around me, I charge directly at him. He’s got good reflexes, but he doesn’t really have much of a fighting style – it’s almost exactly the same punch as before. I let the winds skid me to his left, and his fist shoots wide over my shoulder. This time I notice bronze on his knuckles, and what looks like skin scraped off around it.

My knee comes up into his groin, and I’m going easily twenty five miles per hour by that point. But he doesn’t fall. Definitely not human.

The impact wrenches me off balance, and the winds under my other leg push it right out from under me. I try to roll with the fall, to not let it leave me gasping for breath.

His left hand grabs my leg just below the knee, and forcibly shifts my momentum almost completely to the horizontal. I'm lucky just to keep from hitting headfirst into the gravel of the parking lot.

Instead I land on my left shoulder, and scrape a path four or five yards long across the gravel. There's blood in my eye when I pull my head back up, and I think my jaw’s gotten cracked. My arms and hips are on fire from braking all that speed for the rest of me.

Fortunately, the same Master who showed me the secrets of the Wind also taught me how to Heal. Even more fortunately, running isn't a trick at my opponent's disposal. I get to my feet before he's halfway to me, and that's when I realize that I've got a weapon here.

It's just cosmetic damage really, but the gravel ripped me up enough that a small child could follow my bloodtrail if I tried to run away. With any luck, my opponent has the makings of a trail I can follow back to something vital.

Ignoring the swelling in my shoulder, I try to make myself look intimidating. The blood all over my face probably helps. "Clear the area!” I scream. The crowd takes me seriously, and now I have enough room to work.

I need a full geometric spread, a mandala, of cyclones. All around this robot or whatever he is. Whipping up the gravel, and sending it at him from every side.

The car alarms going off tell me I've got plenty of momentum going there. More than enough to rip his fake skin from his body. The real skin too.

Now we're both bleeding, and it gives me a roadmap of his organic parts. As an added bonus, he's got a hell of a lot of dust in his eyes. I wait for the maelstrom to die down, and use the time to Heal my legs. My right arm's in good enough shape for what I need.

I'm running again, and he starts to throw the same damned punch for a third time. This time I duck clear under it, and fishtail at the parked cars. I grab one of the long, narrow shards of glass, and bring up a little too much wind when I push back off the car to head back to him.

To the bronze man's credit, he tries to hit me with both arms for a change. But that just makes it easier for me. Eight feet in front of him, I take to the air, spinning high overhead like an Olympic diver. I'm counting on his reactions to be too slow to stop me once I get behind him.

The glass slides in right under his raised shoulder blade, and scrapes down across whatever he's got that passes for a rib. Then it finds a hole big enough, and bites deep before shattering.

I take four steps back in the time it takes him to turn around, and even without any Power I can see in his eyes that my plan worked. I found a pretty major artery with one of those pieces of glass, and he knows he's dying. He makes a few futile, sputtering motions, but there's no threat here anymore. Too much blood pouring out through the external wound. Just another empty statistic in a battle roster.

I close my eyes, and take the time to rest, to Heal, and to muster what respect I can to listen to the Wind as it drains out of what passes for the bronze man's lungs. At exactly the same instant he breathes his last, a familiar voice calls my name, bringing my attention back to material matters.

"Donald. Lucky thing you were here. Otherwise my friend might have fallen prey to that abomination."

I open my eyes and turn back to the entrance of the strip club. Two of the girls are walking out in their street clothes. The blonde I've never seen before, but the one with the pink dye job snaps all my mental defenses back to high alert.

"Eliana. What did you just set me up to kill for you?"

one year wiser

I chose to step away from my blog for the year of 2006, as an experiment to see what would happen if every clever idea I had didn't immediately spill out onto the page, and instead had the opportunity to fester and mix together, spawning entirely new thoughts for me.

(Okay, a lot of that silence was also caused by my sense of revulsion at the huge financial expense I'd made on the 4=2 books, and the sheer disinterest I encountered in the declared Storytellers in the online forum of 4=2 gaming. So I ran quiet for a while, and re-evaluated what I was doing with myself online.)

Then, late in December of 2006, three simultaneous things came together. First, the long-awaited release of Wild Talents (for which I was a playtester) was finally published. Second, a nine page adaptation kit for the "giant fighting robot pilot" genre of anime was released for WT, by the game's publisher (google for "arcdream" & "ORE Mecha" if you care). Third, an ex-girlfriend informed me that a new trailer had been made for the upcoming live-action "Transformers" film, and unlike the one included in the 20th anniversary DVD of the original animated film, this one actually shows us giant robots.

This all began swirling together in my mind, and I began imagining a game. Set in the continuity of the 2007 film, and with characters of my own imagining. And this... vaporous notion inspired me. To share my thoughts with the world again.

I type these words on January 4th, 2007. Six months to the day before the (scheduled) release of the new TF film. And today, I rejoin the conversation.


Be seeing you.

That "Four Equals Two" thing...

Been stuck reading the tripe, and it's been quite painful. Now 290 pages into the pile, which means I've finished the big blue book of the default core rules, and the setting material for one (yes, just one) of the actual games (the big green book of gold glitter, if anyone cares). Two hundred and ninety pages that I've had to slog through to get to the first bit of it that's actually supposed to be interesting. And people wonder why White Wolf's so ardently transitioning themselves into being just another producer of non-sanctioned supplements for Dungeons & Dragons.

And that seems to be the whole point of the second second edition, making the games that used to be The! Other! Thing! more accessible to people who can't imagine that there are games (such as Yahtzee) that could ever use more than three dice at one time. From using Strength as the default attribute to determine the accuracy of melee attacks, to replacing the existing Merits and Flaws system with a collection of traits that offer incremental enhancements to basic stats (such as Initiative or Speed) or to ignore particular penalties to rolls in a narrowly defined situation (such as Stunt Driving).

Yes. The entire Storyteller System has been retrofitted to be more easily converted to and from D20 Modern. Even to the point of evaporating the concept of "freebie points" so as to allow each clan and covenant, tribe and auspice, or path and order neatly line up into prestige classes without any pesky variations in the number of skill points that each basic starting character gets.

After all, the D20 conversion of the Aeon line was such a sweeping disaster for them; why shouldn't they just throw all their eggs into the least individual-looking basket they can find? I mean, what's recognition of a brand name worth when you could have your books sorted alphabetically by author amid the products of a dozen other companies, and the customers wouldn't notice the difference?

Fuckheads.

a postapocalyptic fantasy notion

I once read somewhere that there's some bible quote about the meek inheriting the Earth, and also that this is supposed to be wildly taken out of context, as it was originally placed as what comes next after people choose between Heaven and Hell during Armageddon. And I got to thinking... If God's done with the world, why would there still be an Earth for them to inherit?

The obvious answer is that the Earth would hang around so that they would have a place to spend the rest of their miserable existences. But, if God's crossed the whole Earth project off his to-do list, what's to keep the legions of Hell from setting up shop?

That's the core idea of the setting. Armageddon happened, the righteous got yoinked upstairs, the wicked got flumped downstairs, and the lazy ass stupid masses remaining got abandoned from above and invaded from below. With Heaven not caring any more, there was nothing to keep the demons from turning the world of the meek into a playground. Mayhem, slaughter, rape, and other vile antics would be commonplace, and lots of less than voluntary demon-human crossbreeding would result. (Bear in mind that the invaders are extradimensional entities who call Hell their home, so there's not a whole lot of ethics for them to worry about.)

This brings us to the topic of an anti-Christ, which theoretically is supposed to be key to Hell's battle plan in their war against Heaven. However, no such animal showed up during Armageddon (later known as the second war against Heaven), giving rise to the popular belief among the demons on Earth that when they do get an anti-Christ, it'll be to lead the way for their third war against Heaven (thus all the crossbreeding).

A few centuries go by, and they seem to have run out of humans. So the full-blooded demons (and a rare fraction of the hybrids with the right powers) go back to Hell for whatever's going on there, while the vast majority of the many various and sundry hybrids lack the ability to travel between worlds. So the world's remaining population are all demonic hybrids, and it's a nasty brutal place.

However, the world hasn't been destroyed yet, so there must be at least one of the meek remaining. In the first arc of the story, that survivor is discovered, most likely in cryogenic suspension of some sort. And it's a woman, thus giving the anti-Christ hopefuls a goal.

Her main ally would be a demonic hybrid of a more practical sort, who believes that "third time's the charm" is a bad plan for picking a fight with Heaven. Plus, he's got no cause to believe that he'll be rescued when the Earth eventually gets destroyed, so keeping her alive (and neither pregnant nor running screaming into the night for somebody else to then go kill her) is in his best interests.

And as they say, wackiness shall inevitably ensue...

Blitz -- six month report

Six months ago today, Blitz came to live with my family. It feels like it's been longer; like it's been a couple of years. He's so deeply ingrained himself into the structure of the family, that it's hard to picture what life was like without him here.

I still miss Kathren, of course. I miss how she'd lick my face, how excited she'd get at the sight of a pizza box, how she'd make a fool of herself every time it rained. But Kathren's dead, and Blitz isn't ever going to be able to replace her, really.

I was walking Blitz around the houses overlooking the river last night, and I got to thinking about a comic book story in which a hundred pound sled dog would be a main character...

------------------------------------

Picture a man walking his dog at night through the streets of a small city. The man has a rifle slung over his shoulder (which none of the passersby seem to think is out of the ordinary), and the dog is of course a huge powerful animal (just like my Blitz). There's some calm, mildly introspective narrative captions in the man's "voice", which get interrupted at some pithy moment by an automobile accident in the street in front of him.

A delivery truck plows head-on into the driver's side of an SUV, causing the SUV to be flipped over and spun around. The truck comes to a stop shortly thereafter, but the man is rushing to the SUV, pausing just long enough to tell his dog to "stay" as he drops the leash. The driver's a woman, unconscious, and her door is wrenched shut by the impact. So the man runs around to the opposite side where the passenger (an old man, soon revealed to be the driver's father) is injured but conscious.

The dogwalker tells the old man to cover his face, then uses the butt of his rifle to break in the window, allowing him to pull the old man out of the car. The old man insists that the dogwalker go rescue his daughter as well, and so he crawls back in. The woman's seat belt is stuck, so the dogwalker has to cut through it with a knife that he presumably had on his person somewhere.

But before he can cut the woman free, she wakes up and goes psycho on her rescuer, trying to attack and bite him. He swears, takes the knife, and jams it into her skull, which doesn't stop her but does allow him to hold her back long enough to fumble for his rifle. He pushes the rifle forward, missing her head and pushing the rifle up against the window.

He pulls the trigger, shattering the window, and then abandons the rifle, concentrating on keeping her back from biting him. He then shouts the dog's name, and it comes running across the scene, smashing through the remains of the window and grabbing the woman by the back of her neck, snapping it with the brutal efficiency of a predatory animal.

The man tells his dog to "heel", crawls back out of the overturned SUV, retrieves his rifle, and the narrative captions resume, establishing for the reader that this is a zombie story.

Questions? Comments?

A CURE FOR THE IDIOCY OF "FOUR EQUALS TWO" -- Part one; the setting.

As stated immediately above, I'm not what you'd call a fan of the fourth edition of White Wolf's "World of Darkness" setting for their modern horror RPGs. The writing staff responsible for the transition from third to fourth edition have systematically gutted every single game line of whatever it was that I most enjoyed in that particular line, and this leaves me feeling abandoned.

So, I've gone off and started putting the pieces back together, to create a game that I can enjoy. Details follow the obligatory disclaimer.

DISCLAIMER: I already said that this project originates in my fondness for the material that didn't make the final cut for White Wolf's second second edition. There will be numerous systemic and mathematical allusions to those now out-of-print games. This is not plagiarism, as such allusions are openly admitted, and this work is not intended for any sort of profit. Furthermore, this is a work of fiction, and can be readily filed under "More Bricks" for those familiar with the reference. And while I'm on the subject, the killer attack weasels crawling out of your monitor screen are purely a figment of your imagination. Carry on.

SETTING OUTLINE: Years ago a conveniently evil corporation was in the process of buying up all sorts of "exotic" research from other companies (and defunct government agencies), and they set up a project combining elements of psionics research and human bioengineering. This project resulted in the creation of numerous human "puppets", rapidly grown to maturity, programmed with necessary skills, and intended for lease to various clients who had little concern for the legality of these endeavors.

These puppets were all engineered to be attractive, athletic, equipped with a variety of psionic capabilities, and very prone to mind control. The conveniently evil corporation also engineered a "master-brain" to exercise that mind control over the puppets, ensuring that their puppets would obey their orders without question, and would always come back home (or destroy themselves) when the lease expired.

However, some of the conveniently evil corporation's matchingly evil clients wanted puppets designed for purposes ranging from seduction/infiltration to pyrokinetic bombing, and it was inevitable that some covert government agency would trace these puppets back to the conveniently evil corporation, classifying it as a credible threat to be targeted for elimination.

An assault was launched on the conveniently evil corporation's puppeteering facility, the defenses were overpowered, and the master-brain was killed, cutting the strings on all the puppets. The aforementioned agency realized what a valuable strategic and tactical resource these puppets could be, and decided not to simply dispose of them. However, the same activities which brought them to the aforementioned agency's attention had also been noticed by other competing agencies in other governments, and the decision was made to let the situation cool down for a while before exploiting this particular resource.

The surviving ex-puppets were placed into mundane civilian lives, and several years went by quietly. Then the international situation took a turn for the worse, and the aforementioned agency decieded that it was time to begin tapping the psionic capabilities of the ex-puppets. A few at a time, they were brought back in, given training as necessary to bring them up to date with the current methodologies and equipment, and sent out into the field as "exotic operatives" to accomplish missions that defy orthodox solutions.

[coming up next, the basic systems stuff]

HEROISM IN THE GUTTER – a retrospective by Calvin Jordan, Doctorate of Sociology

I look at the newspaper, the television, even outside my office window, and I see men streaking across the sky, blazes of plasma fire burning from the husks of Girandi wardroids, and the wreckage of ruined luxury cars littering the ground of the dealership across the street.

Two decades ago, things were different; we had real heroes back then. Not self-absorbed rock stars who create far more property damage feuding over merchandizing sales than they ever manage to prevent when posing as serious crimefighters. For those were different days, peopled by individuals of conviction and virtue. Towering men and women, people who embodied the hope for a brighter tomorrow. And the greatest of them were the Advance.

Seven men and women, devoted to the highest ideals of the human condition. They weren’t the most powerful heroes, not all of them. But they didn’t need to be. They had something else, something more that made them special. And together, those seven were truly one of a kind; nothing could stop them from holding the line against violence and despair. Until they weren’t seven any more.

Doctor Sondra Hastings was a woman of infinite compassion and patience, who never found a need to take up a masked identity in order to help the innocent. She possessed no impressive gifts for destruction, being rather a healer of bodies and spirits. She provided the Advance with their moral center, the essential spark that separated them from the contemporary groups so misplaced in comparison to those true heroes. And, lacking her teammates' capacity for physical spectacle, it was sadly inevitable that she would be the first to fall in battle.

Her death was not only a blow to the Advance, but to all humankind, in that without her stabilizing influence the rest of the Advance had lost their sense of connection to the masses of everyday humanity they had pledged to serve. Although they made a valiant effort, none of the surviving members of the Advance had the saintly reserves of temperance necessary to hold six such bombastic personalities together to present a united front in pursuing their dreams. And so, with startling rapidity, they drifted apart and faded from the world’s greatest spotlight.

A few former members of the Advance (most notably Starcarver and the Wraith) continued to operate on their own for a few years after the group’s breakup, but as new teams of increasingly aggressive powered crimefighters emerged into the public consciousness these relics of a fading golden age inevitably withdrew completely into their private lives.

Of the surviving members, only Starcarver’s real identity is known to the general public: Jack Braithwaite, the only son of Michael Braithwaite (of Los Angeles’ prestigious corporate law firm Cooper, Simons, Braithwaite, and Davenport), and grandson of Hollywood legend Veronica Duchene-Braithwaite. Having given up crimefighting (if not his youthful looks and vitality) more than a decade ago, Braithwaite is rarely available for interviews, but on one such rare occasion three years ago, Braithwaite did have comments regarding the dissolution of the Advance.

“A lot of people, old fans I guess; they ask me the same question. Why did [the Advance] break up? And why didn’t we ever come back together? And after all these years, the answer is painful in its simplicity; almost as painful as the irony in me of all people being the only one left to answer the question. Everything dies; even the dreams of heroes.”

So where does that leave us; in a world whose brightest hopes are gun-toting killers splattered with the blood of innocent bystanders?

No, because there is another truism to consider: that fashion is cyclical, with a half-life of twenty years. It has been a long, cold winter, but spring is coming. And some day soon, the people will look up from their televisions and newspapers and burning wreckage, and they will see our heroes again. Real heroes.

the consequences of watching Marla Singer die

WARNING: This post contains massive spoilers for the huge plot twist at the core of the film "Fight Club", and I can not stress enough how little understanding you'll have of this post if you've never seen that most exceptional film. And now, on with the show.
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Wow. I had never noticed that before. In the kitchen after learning that Marla spent the night screwing Tyler, Jack's voiceover says "if only I had wasted a couple of minutes and gone to watch Marla Singer die, none of this would have happened". But he's not saying that to himself there in the kitchen. It's part of the larger voiceover, which results from the entire story being told in flashback, as he's sitting in the room where Tyler had stuck a gun in his mouth.

So, when he says "none of this", he doesn't mean Marla being there in his home, screwing his best friend, and intruding on his life like she'd intruded on his support groups. He's referring back to the pre-flashback line "and suddenly, I realize that all of this: the gun, the bombs, the revolution... has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer".

If only Jack had wasted a couple of minutes and gone to watch Marla Singer die, he wouldn't have found himself without his pants, sitting in a chair on the top floor of an empty skyscraper, while his best friend shoves a gun into his mouth and counts down the timer on the explosives in the basement...

Wow.

a quick laugh

Anyone who knows me will be fully aware that I've almost always got stories of superheroes and villains (most frequently of either Dennis O'Neil or Warren Ellis's writing) in my head. And most recently, I've been thinking up a scenario featuring the Joker.

He breaks out of Arkham, only to find that Batman is off with the Justice League somewhere, and not available to play their special game. So, in search of the Batman's attention, the Joker takes a road trip. He finds some third-string city with a team of third-string heroes, breaks every single one of their third-string villains out of jail, organizes them into a villainous team against the heroes they've each already fought solo, and sets up a big confrontation between the two teams. Then, at the pinnacle of the action, he rains Joker-venom gas down on them all.

Because if a gaggle of third-string heroes and villains all dead and grinning together in the bottom of a pit won't earn him Batman's undivided attention, nothing will.

Bad dog; Good dog

Mia (from the post "Hope of Good Puppies") was a wash. She's too gentle, too accommodating, and too disinterested in developing any kind of personal bond with anyone in the family. She just doesn't have what it takes to be a good protector. Fortunately, she's not the only dog around.

This past saturday, my family and I drove out to Stratford CT for me to meet a wonderful six year old Malamute named Blitz. My father and brother had met him the sunday before, and forty-five minutes after I walked into the yard and met this dog, he was next to me in the backseat of our car, riding to his new home.

He's wonderful. He's sweet and affectionate and calm and quiet. He possesses the most civilized manners I've ever seen in a dog, and every time my baby boy decides not to try to make friends, Blitz turns away from the cat, lies down on the floor, and stares at the far wall until he's sure the cat has gone away. And he weighs a hundred pounds.

We took him to the veterinary clinic today, for his first general checkup with his new doctor. Everything's good. He's got a possible infection between two toes on a hind leg, but Dr. Holly wrote him a script for antibiotics and told us to soak his foot in epson salts (and warm water, of course) daily for the swelling, so that just in case it's something more serious we won't have to worry about infection creating a false positive on any tests.

So, for the first time since the summer of 2000, I actually have a Malamute to go home to after a bad day. This is a very good development in my life. Now if only Blitz was a bit more comfortable with being outdoors for long enough periods to present a visual impression of a hundred pound wolf staring down the driveway at people who might become threats to his family...

Evil Thoughts (really evil thoughts)

As should be obvious to everyone, the past couple weeks of my life have been characterized by a definite surplus of negative emotions. In an attempt to work that negativity into a creative expression of some sort, I came up with the following, and I want to give the following warning before I go any further.

This is a work of fiction. This is not a secret plan for world domination. This is a premise for a horribly inhumane and ethically depraved scheme to orchestrate a topically benevolent society, suitable to be used in the backdrop of a science fiction story that I may or may not write one of these years. The content below is admittedly monstrous on many levels, and I realize that it'll be equally offensive to leftwing nutbars for its flagrant abuses of basic civil rights and to rightwing nutbars for its flagrant disrespect for the principles of moral decency. Once again, this is a work of fiction. If the reader is not able to keep that in mind, then the author strongly recommends that the reader should back away from the computer and run screaming into the night. Thank you.

The aim of this document is to outline an inhumane and ethically depraved scheme to orchestrate the emergence of a benevolent future-society, in which as many of the people as possible get to be as happy as possible; a society in which there is no war, no crime, and as high a standard of living as possible. And to do it without letting ethical concerns restrain the founder's efforts in the developmental phase.

Start out with the premise of a future setting with space travel, but without faster-than-light speeds. Thus, like in the “Alien” movies, the crew of any given interstellar ship spends the vast majority of the journey in stasis; in order to not die of old age before reaching their destinations. One such ship is specifically designed to fly out to a planet which has been surveyed as potentially inhabitable, bring a bunch of colonists there (thus relieving population pressures on whatever world the ship came from), and set them up with what they need to build an initial town and basic satellite system, so they can begin developing the planet as a colony.

This ship is equipped with various things the colonists will need, such as terraforming robots, library computers, and a microbiology lab to deal with indigenous bacteria, not to mention a number of automated systems in order to allow it to traverse interstellar space without need of a full crew, instead leaving just one person on duty at a time to respond to the computer’s automated prompts and deal with problems that might arise in open space.

Of course, reviving a person from stasis is a delicate process, and one that requires direct supervision by the crewman on duty to deal with potentially damaging imbalances in the system. Therefore, at the end of each duty shift, the poor shmuck who’s at the end of his shift wakes up the next poor shmuck on the duty roster, informs his replacement of whatever’s going on, and then the new guy on duty puts the previous guy on duty back into stasis with the rest of the crew.

But one day, as the ship is nearing its destination, the on-duty crewman decides that just making another franchise of the society they just came from isn’t good enough. He’s got all sorts of idealistic ideas about how their current society is bad, and he decides to make a better one instead, for the benefit of future generations. (It’s worth noting at this point that extended isolation can have deleterious effects on a person’s mind, and this guy has almost certainly been having far too many conversations with himself by the point where he reaches this decision.)

He knows that the rest of the crew won’t appreciate his vision of a better tomorrow, so he decides not to just wake up the guy scheduled to take over at the end of his shift and go back into stasis himself until they arrive at the planet. Instead, he lets the guy wait in stasis, while he goes off to work up plans to found a perfect society.

The first thing he needs is a population that is willing to believe in his ideals, which he knows he can’t get in one step. But if he can get his hands on some kids, and control their education, then he can control what they learn and what they believe, giving him an admiring population to work with. Assuming that no other adults are around to give the children dissenting opinions. With enough crew members in stasis to experiment with, it should be possible for him to play around with the delicate settings on the revival systems and work out a way to leave the revived folks brain damaged enough to be non-threats to his agenda.

So, after however many test runs it takes to work out the right level of miscalibration, he manages to get somebody from the crew alive and well and breathing and not thinking too much. Set up some restraints, some IV tubes for nutrition and respirators and whatnot, and he’s got some technically-alive people on hand. And that gives him a gene pool from which to develop some artificially inseminated kids for him to educate in the wonderful glories of his perfect society.

(Yes, I am suggesting lobotomization, rape, and forced pregnancy as means to what are theoretically going to be revealed to be noble and benevolent ends. I did say “inhumane and ethically depraved”, after all.)

So, the kids get an education of his own design, with zero content of history, and plenty of indoctrination that he’s the great wise wonderful founder who brought them out from the darkness beyond the stars and who is preparing (using the aforementioned terraforming robots, which can easily be remote-deployed on the destination planet before the kids are old enough to be indoctrinated) an idyllic world for them to live in. This way, the population doesn’t know to question his methods, and thus they have far less reason to want to rebel against him.

In the founder’s determination, the main hazards to a stable society are as follows. (1) internal population pressures, driving down the per capita production levels and lowering the standard of living; (2) external economic pressures stemming from trade imbalances with other societies; and (3) internal social pressures for individuals and their families to achieve fame and fortune, and to develop an expanding influence from year to year and generation to generation.

The economic pressure is the easiest to prevent, simply by isolating the society. Include in the cultural indoctrination the idea that this is a wonderful world for them to live in, and the outside universe is big and bad and evil, and to be avoided at all costs. And then, when the kids eventually move planetside, set up the ship’s orbital operations modules not as communications satellites to facilitate contact with incoming spaceships, but as laser defense platforms and warning beacons.

“This planet is under biohazard quarantine. Native lifeforms are extremely hostile and toxic. Do not attempt to land. Warning shots will be fired on any ships attempting to approach the planet.” And when you’re being shot at by automated defense platforms completely flanking you on the side facing towards the planet, you don’t take the time to carefully examine the planet’s surface to notice that it really is inhabited, after all.

So now we’ve got the planet nice and isolated so that it can’t develop external economic pressures. Next is the population pressure. That’s another easy one to prevent. Simply remove the link between copulation and reproduction. Every girl gets her tubes tied or whatnot, so that unplanned pregnancies don’t happen. Every girl gets to have, over the course of her life, one daughter. Every boy gets to have one son. When premature deaths happen, additional birthings get authorized by the governmental bureaucracy. Thus, a fixed population value can be achieved and maintained, without human stupidity (like forgetting to use a condom) mucking it up. Start out with a relatively small population number for the initial move down from the ship to the first town, and expand it as they spread out over the face of the planet.

Finally, we have the hardest hazard to deal with; the hazard of human ambition giving rise to family dynasties, amassing wealth and influence over generations until they can directly tinker with the workings of the government. (This is another part where I had to be particularly evil in my scheming.)

First, you get rid of the concept of families. You have “son of” and “daughter of” as described above, but that’s it. No usage of the terms “husband” or “wife”. And since people aren’t being paired off into breeding units, there’s suddenly no need for males and females to populate the society in equal number, which means that a major stratification of society can be biologically implemented, providing an intrinsic and undeniable point of reference for the social divide between the aristocracy and the proletariat.

Now, since the founder is male, and it’s pretty well understood that people who have lots of sex wind up spending a lot of energy on being happy, leaving them with much less energy to spend on being discontented and destabilizing to society, it’s reasonable for the founder to be selective in the aforementioned artificial insemination to manipulate the ratio of males to females, setting every guy up with a harem. (Because any guy who goes out to make himself an emperor is going to set up a harem for himself, and if all the other guys get harems too, that’s one less reason for them to try to rebel against his authority.)

And, because it works with the basic premise of a harem, and it stratifies society in such a way as to prevent the proletariat from achieving rebellion, the culture is established that females aren’t allowed to own any kind of tangible property. Such as the clothes and homes in which they gain shelter from the elements, once the population moves planetside. Thus, even though the girls drastically outnumber the boys, their dependence on the property-owning men for access to the basic necessities of survival prevents any chance of a proletariat rebellion against the founder’s intended structure of aristocratic authority.

However, there is still the threat of patriarchal dynasties developing economic and political influence. To prevent this, the basic plan for authorized reproduction is significantly redrafted. In each girl’s life, she still automatically gets permission to have one daughter (assuming of course she can find a man willing to provide the sperm for her artificial insemination), with additional female birthings being authorized as needed due to premature deaths. However, male birthings become more restricted, requiring specific authorization for each. Each man’s wealth and influence is kept track of by some sort of census bureau, and those who have significantly more than average get to have multiple sons, so that when they die, their sons (each of whom will most likely have already moved out into their own homes) split the inheritance, cutting the largest shares of the society’s wealth into more equitable fractions, thus inhibiting the development of familial dynasties.

Of course, with a blatant majority (quite possibly more than 90%) of the population being female, it’s necessary for them not to be simply illiterate fuckpuppets. Plus, the point of this whole exercise is to design a stable benevolent society in which everyone is as happy as possible. Thus, everybody gets unlimited free education (and medical care) as a basic part of the government’s operating budget, and with the (property-owning) men working in particularly responsible positions in the government bureaucracy, the rest of the skilled labor jobs go to the educated women, with unskilled labor being largely subsumed by the established robotics and the low population pressure.

Additionally, if physical property is restricted to the biologically-designated aristocracy and higher education is made free to all, it becomes feasible to lower the age of legal adulthood to 14 (when children will readily be developed enough to function as fully sexually active and even potentially reproductive members of society), so that a much smaller portion of each person’s life is spent under the direct supervision of parental figures, adding another layer of defense against unwanted social influence to be exerted by the force of familial bonds, without sacrificing the ability of any given student to seek higher education.

However, with so many girls and so few boys in the population, and the basic premise that people who have lots of sex are less likely to foster rebellion, it becomes necessary to institute girl-girl sexual relations as a basic aspect of the society, if everyone is to have opportunities to be happy and productive. This decision is supplemented by careful choices of linguistics. Pre-adult males are called “boys” and adult males called “men, while all females are called “girls”, which fits with their not being able to own their own homes upon coming of legal age. Furthermore, girl-girl sex is called “play”, while girl-boy sex is called “service”. Thus, the cultural superiority of males is indoctrinated into everybody, and the “be good and productive and contribute to society” mantra leads girls right into the harem function.

Within this linguistic scheme, masturbation becomes a taboo for older children and all adults, as both “play” and “service” allow both participants to draw pleasure from the experience, and “playing with yourself” is a fundamentally exclusionary act, thus preventing the various girls in the masturbator’s life from having the opportunity to be socially-contributory in their service (or play, as the case may be). Similarly, male homoeroticism becomes anathema, as every child is indoctrinated that girls are supposed to service boys and boys are supposed to let the girls service them, so that by allowing male homoerotic urges to be indulged, the offending males are depriving all the girls that each of them knows from having the opportunity to contribute to society by servicing them.

So, let’s take the example of an adult girl. She grew up in the house where her mother was living, and at age 14 she moved out to the house of another man in order to go have her own life (and so that the society doesn’t get eroded by inbreeding). In elementary school, she learned to play with the other girls, and she is still free to do so. Also, she learned to service men, and she enjoys doing that too. She continued going to higher levels of school, learned various subjects, and now she has a career.

She doesn’t get paid for that career of course, because she isn’t allowed tangible property. The man whose house she lives in doesn’t get paid either, because she’s not a slave. She can move out to another man’s house whenever she wants, if she should choose to. Instead, there’s a calculated index of how much of a contribution she makes to society. And this is (combined with the indexes for the other people in the same household, since the girls aren’t allowed to buy groceries for themselves) used to determine how much of a share of the society’s production of goods and services it is reasonable for her household to be consuming.

And that’s basically the society as it’s set up by the great founder during his lifetime. Eventually, he dies. And, not having had access to learn about any other historical models of civilization, the people on his little planet continue his policies in the centuries that follow. Now, let’s jump our frame of reference ahead a few centuries.

We’ve got every man on this planet having a luxurious home (because there are so many fewer homes to build and outfit, there’s a lot less to be spent on redundant kitchens and whatnot), a cushy government job with a vote in the planet’s legislative Conclave, and several girls at home who have been indoctrinated from birth that it’s socially irresponsible to fail to service him. We’ve also got the girls living in his home, each of whom has free unlimited health care, free unlimited education, a lot of leeway in finding a career for herself, and no financial considerations to worry about in her life. She’s also got at least one man in her life whom she can service more or less whenever the urge strikes her, and an assortment of other girls (both at home and in the workplace) who she’s been trained to enjoy playing with (and vice versa).

Does it sound like everybody gets to be happy?
Does it sound like everybody gets to be productive?

Hope of Good Puppies

I work evening shift (noon to 10pm), and thus I usually get my "lunch" hour at roughly 4.30pm, when somebody from afternoon school runs is available to cover my desk while I get away from the office for a while. Today, when I drove home for lunch and pulled over curbside to be able to back the car up the driveway, I was met by a most endearing sight.

My cat (who was raised from kittenhood by our wonderful Malamute, and thus honestly thinks he's a very small dog rather than a cat) was sitting at the far end of the driveway, intently watching everything that went by on the street in front of our house. He was being a guard dog for his family. With Kathren gone, he's taken that responsibility onto himself, just as Rusty had always done when he was a kitten. So maybe I still have a good puppy in my life after all.

In related news, my parents and I have been looking into the possibility of adopting another guard dog to protect our family, and tomorrow we plan to go to the local Humane Society to meet a gorgeous Husky named Mia.

(I seem to lack the technical savvy to make the image appear within this blog entry, but the link is as follows: http://www.humanesocietybg.org/MiaHusky1Large.JPG)

With any luck, she'll be calm, sweet, loving, family-oriented, and willing to accept a dog-raised feline as a member of the family. If so, then she'll have a nice home and we'll have another good dog in our family. And if not... my baby boy comes first, and any threat to his safety will not be welcome in my home.

Coming up next, a proofread and readable presentation of horribly evil thoughts that have been percolating from the surplus of negative emotions due to the past week's events. Reader discretion is advised.

Where to Begin

I've been trying to decide what to say at the start of this blog. Trying to think of something brilliant, witty, sarcastic, astute, or otherwise clever. Something worth saying.

Three days ago, I watched my sister die.

That's it. That's the only declarative statement I can wrap my mind around. Kathren was a beautiful dog. She protected her family, and she loved me without question. She was the closest thing I had to a confidant. And she's dead now.

Yesterday, my brother graduated from college. It was a big social event in my family, and my father came home from work early on Thursday in something of a hurry to get everything set up to go attend the graduation ceremony. And Kathren has never been known for her ability to see a need to get out of the way of fast-moving objects several times her size. And thus the day was taken up entirely with taking her to the veterinarian, getting x-rays, and whatever procedures were done to try to minimize the bleeding.

Next would have come the surgical procedures, but the x-rays were a surprise. We knew Kathren was about ten years old based on when we adopted her, but it turns out her arthritis was five times as severe as we had guessed. And given the size and depth of the wound on her leg, infection and amputation were likely prospects. And she's not a young dog.

Even if the surgery was a success, even if she came out from under the anesthesia without incident, even if she was able to adapt to physical therapy to deal with the lack of a leg, it would cost us more than twenty thousand dollars to try. And odds were slim. So my parents made the decision that afternoon that in the morning we'd do the paperwork thing and the doctors would kill my sister.

I didn't know any of this, of course. I was still at the office, doing everything I could to hold things together while my father took most of the day off. I found out during the ride home that night. It was not my finest hour.

Friday morning, my father and I went to the veterinarian's office, did the paperwork thing, and were led into a back room where my sister was laid out on a heavy comforter folded over into quarters. She was breathing raggedly, with a huge red (actually red fabric, not soaked-through red) bandage wrapped around her right rear leg, and numerous points where intravenous lines had been inserted.

It was obvious that she was in terrible pain. Her eyes were scummy with tear-soaked goop that builds up in dogs' eyes, and she didn't even try pulling herself up to slobber all over my face and beg me to make it all stop being bad. There wasn't any choice. I did everything I could to comfort her, while my father signed the final paperwork and the doctor fetched the injection.

As the blue fluid was pushed into her bloodstream, I held my face right in front of her nose and petted her cheek and neck constantly with my free hand. And I listened to her heartbeat fade, and watched the light vanish from her eyes.

It happened so fast. So much faster than Rusty. He was a malamute, and he had his children there with him to the very end. He had so many reasons to be a tough son of a bitch that day. Kathren was a white german shepherd, and she first came to our family after she'd gotten kicked in the head by a horse (thus the earlier bit about fast-moving objects several times her size). She was never that bright when it came to the consequences of her actions.

But I was with her there at the end. I took care of her with every moment I had available from the first second that I'd been told about the accident. And now she's gone. And I'm alone.

I've always been a dog person. Sue-Bie raised me. Rusty sheltered me. Kathren adored me. Every stage of my life that I have any positive memories of is defined by the dog who I had to hug when I got cold and scared and lonely. And now I don't have anyone.

I don't know what comes next.