NaNoWriMo Fivepeat: or, After the Happy Dance

For the fifth consecutive time, I've won NaNoWriMo; for the second time in a row, I've won it early. I'm not about to reach last year's 85,000-word record, but then now that I've won I no longer feel the urgency that drives me during Panic Time. After all, I'm actually posting my novel right here, and I've set semiweekly deadlines for myself.

Still, when the NaNo validator bot turned my green word count bar purple, I whooped and hollered loud enough to disturb the neighbors and did my happy dance; and I still intend to celebrate my victory with champagne and pizza. I now have enough NaNo victories to put rings on all the fingers of one hand, like the Steelers and 49ers.

But what comes next? Since both volumes of Spanner are far from being even half done, there's NaNoFiMo, and then JanNoWriMo after that. I'll use those WriMos to whip up enough chapters to post so Spanner won't interfere with my fourth and last go-round with Bad Company during NaNoEdMo, nor with my next 50-song FAWM. Also, I can get back to drawing, too, now that I have enough time again.

One thing won't change. I'm going to continue posting Spanner, chapter by chapter, all the way to the Outro. It ain't over, as the saying goes, till it's over.

Spanner Chapter 8: Better Living Through Chemistry

I only got around to outlining this chapter before I burned out on AugNoWriMo for the third consecutive year. The name is one of the first I came up with for the original Spanner comic, back in the late 1990s; the final scene (before the Interlude) is one of the first scenarios I scripted for the proposed manga back in the early ’00s. (Another scene I wrote during that period is the one in which she wakes up with Dexter.) As I ended up actually writing it, it’s bookended by two of the series’ biggest turning points. Like Chapter 7, it turned out to be a “theme” episode, though still entirely within the plot. Of course, I had to throw Shira’s birthday into the mix, with a surprise new character...

Stick around as the plot darkens...

Sexbots 2: The Rapebots Are Coming

Last post, I pointed out that, like jetpacks, aircars, and hoverboards, sex robots actually exist in the real world today. But this post is about the possible dark side. And I don't mean all those men who will be turning away from heterosexuality in favor of robosexuality, which will likely hit the economy pretty hard. I mean crime.

Now, take your typical Russian mafia/secret police (same thing) hacker. He tends to be consumed with his tribe's desire for revenge against the non-Russian world. He spends way too much time designing viruses, worms, and botnet assimilants. He gets a sexbot. Once sexbots are mass produced, every gangster will have to have at least one sexbot, partly as a status symbol and partly because gangsters hate women. What does our botnet master do with a sexbot? Well, maybe he keeps one for actual sex. Any extras, though, he hacks into rapebots. And he could hack any sexbot connected to the Internet into a rapebot.

Take a certain yakuza (Koji-kun's father in Spanner) whose favorite manga is the infamous Rapeman. By 2014, sexbots are being mass produced in Japan. He's going to turn a male sexbot into a robot Rapeman no matter what. Then he's going to send his Rapebot after that treacherous gaijin whore who stole his number one son away from him. Little does he know that the gaijin in question, one Shira Thomas, is enough of a hacker that she can use her smartphone to hack his rapebot so that it goes after, say, poor Koji-kun in order to rape him. And yes, she's yaoi fangirl enough to do it.

And then what about the malfunctioning sexbots that innocently rape any human female at hand due to some glitch?

Of course, when you talk about the dark side, you must mention potential military uses. No, not as (robo)sexual partners for lonely soldiers. No, as weapons. What if the US military decided it wanted to use rapebots as a weapon of war, especially against the hated "Wogs" in the Middle East? And some of those sexual combots get even further hacked because some psychopath has developed a fetish for serial killer rapebots? Now put one of those serial killer rapebots in the hands of angry power-seeking narcissist Drusilla Becket, and then you'll really have a cyberpunk story then...

And then how about the microchipped humans who get remotely mind-controlled into sexbots? The principle is the same as the ex-con soldiers mind-controlled by the military, or the "Manchurian candidates" who have long been the special darlings of all the spy agencies.

One of my planned major story threads in Spanner involves Shira's amazing ability to hack combots to do her will against their own masters (or just rip their own heads off). How did she learn this ability? By learning how to hack sexbots, especially the one she gets for Christmas from her adoring Aunt Willa in Book 2.

Black hat sexbot hacking? You know that idea's cyberpunk to the core. In fact, back in 1993 Mike Saenz of Shatter fame created an all-CGI cyberpunk comic book called Donna Matrix featuring a bondage sexbot whose brain is replaced by a combot's, so the idea's already part of the cyberpunk canon...

Next: meat puppets...

Spanner Chapter 7: Here Come the Brides

Okay, yuri fans, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. Originally Chapter 5 in the original JulNoWriMo draft, this entire chapter is pure yuri in concentrate. Ironically, it has nothing about the story’s central relationship, the one between Shira and Leila...

Even though I wrote this chapter from scratch in July and all its story ideas are new, it has its roots in the mid-Nineties origin of Spanner. First I read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae in 1992, then I found the infamous yaoi manga Desperate Love 1989 (Zetsuai) in fan translation online in 1996. The combination was as explosive as the chemical reaction that results when you put metallic sodium in water, and Spanner began to take its mature form as the yuri manga I wanted it to be. You can consider this chapter an aftershock of that mind bomb.

Special Guest Stars: President Sarah Palin AMERICA! and her dog Spot! soon-to-be ex-husband...

Our Cyberpunk World: The Sexbots Are Here

The article: Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasm (and many more linked from there)
[Update: Other relevant articles include The Future of Coitus: Life-Long Loving with a Sexbot, The Implications of Sexbots, and How Will Sexbots Change the World?]

You'd think sex robots are something out of a cyberpunk science fiction novel. Well, they were, back in the 1980s. Comes the Internet age around 1995 or so, and when the "cyborgasm" fad got boring, robot designers turned to more enduring cyberpleasures and began building sexbots. Fifteen years later, they're on the verge of entering mass production. They're also on the verge of being banned by puritanical tyrannies such as the United States of America. Ironically, it'll be because many feminists hate the idea — because it'll give some heterosexual men an excuse to abandon women altogether, to the point of declaring women obsolete. Of course, they conveniently forget to realize that women are using male sexbots engineered and programmed to give them sexual pleasures of a high level that no man, hand, dildo, or vibrator can pull off.

Sure, some men will get so addicted to their sexbots that women will seem sexually boring and merely human in comparison. The same goes for women in relation to men. Inevitably, some creative robot engineer will come up with sexbots specifically designed for same-sex robosex, particularly the male models with self-lubricating penises like seme characters in Japanese yaoi manga. And, of course, some people will be just plain robosexual and not even be attracted to other humans at all.

Now fast forward to 2014 and Spanner. Sexbots are now being mass produced in Japan and Europe. America is ruled by a dictatorship theocratic enough to ban sexbots on principle (i.e. because of the Christian Right's holy hatred of sex or anything else remotely fun). That makes sexbots highly prized contraband, and you bet the Mafias will quickly secure a lock on sexbot distribution in the New Confederacy. Strangely enough, the United Corporations' sex-fascist Eugenics Institute doesn't have a problem with people having sex with robots as long as sex between humans remains rigidly regulated "for the improvement of the race". A new way to bring down a high-ranking politician, cop, or pastor in an inferno of scandal? Catch him purchasing or using a sexbot. Meanwhile, sexbots become status symbols and fashion items among the "morality"-averse antiprohibitionists. You can buy one off the Mafias, or steal it from them (a favorite Team Spanner recreation), or kludge up one or a few of your own.

Sexbots aren't just something out of 1980s cyberpunk novels, or 1970s New Wave science fiction for that matter. Like jetpacks and aircars, they're already here; the only question is what they cost and when they'll go into mass production.

Next: the dark side...

Spanner Chapter 6: Fight for the Right

One more chapter written during JulNoWriMo ’10 and containing four scenes that originated as scripted manga scenarios in my Project Notebooks from the early Noughts (Notebooks 11 through 14): the bus, the principal’s office, the five-on-one brawl, the girls’ locker room. I changed those scenes somewhat from the early scripts to refine them and put them in their proper place in the plot, but otherwise they remain fundamentally the same as I when I scripted almost a decade ago. All the other scenes are new.

There’s much more fighting here than in previous chapters (though there’s lots of bombs in Chapter 3), mainly because Shira has multiple run-ins with head boy Bart and his Tournament fighters. As far back as the Nineties I wanted to throw lots of fight scenes into the Spanner manga, and they would have looked too cool for words. However, right now I’m stuck with words, so I guess I’ll have to deal for now...

The title is a pun. Bonus points to those who get it.

Spanner Chapter 5: I Lerned Alot in Skool

The most “manga cliché” part of this novel I originally planned as a manga is the high school setting. Sure enough, here we are back in high school (even if the school in question is not the one I went to back in the day). But this onetime school outcast (I was the weird kid whom the jocks nicknamed “Space Helmet”) refuses to romanticize his teenage years. For, face it, my youth was hell. And so, probably, was yours, even if it wasn’t as bad as mine. And the jock, prep, and mean girl princess cliques remain as hellbent as ever on making life hell for those beneath them in the social hierarchy.

Now, into this unlit powderkeg where kids with adult pull persecute outcasts and misfits, where earnest educators struggle against fascistic boot-camp martinets, throw a Molotov cocktail. Better yet, fly her in on a hoverboard, just like the one that Spanner himself rides. And watch the chaos ensue.

Class is now in session. You had better hope that this turns out to be a positive learning experience.

Spanner Chapter 4: Special Delivery Service

Excuse me while I go all FAWM liner note...

This was originally going to be Chapter 2 when I wrote it during JulNoWriMo, but the original Chapter 1 grew so huge I split it into three separate chapters. So now you’re looking at Chapter 4. The first two parts conclude the extended opening begun in Chapter 1. The third part is a homage partly to William Gibson’s recent novels set in the present day and partly to gangster movies. The final part could be from a spy movie, a gangster movie, a classic film noir, or Pulp Fiction. Finally, Part 1 was written during AugNoWriMo for a Chapter 2 I originally intended to put between the original Chapter 1 and this. I found only two fragments of the AugNo Chapter 2 usable: the first establishes the suicide bomber’s motive, so I put it in Chapter 3 where it belongs; the second, I put here. The last part is a late continuity retrofit [which now incorporates one of the original scenes planned for this early section of the novel].

The two [now three] sections (counting the entire extended opening) are closely connected, but the connection is not yet apparent. However, I’m not yet done introducing characters; I won’t be done with that for another several chapters still...

Note: You’ll find lots of ethnic slurs from this point on. When they’re capitalized and used as if trademarked, they designate the national origins of the Mafias, as here. After all, gangsters are more tribal than most people and far more prone to Fantastic Racism. You've already met the “Honkies” (i.e. Minuteman); here we meet the “Russkies” (Russian Mafiya) and “Wops” (Italian Mafia); soon the “Japs” (Yakuza), “Chinks” (Triad), “Micks” (Irish mob), and other Mafias will invade the story. And yes, they’re all irrationally racist about each other, usually to violent extremes. And wait till you meet the “Freaks”... (However, “mudblood” never designates a Mafia and is always used as a racial slur. Jennifer will explain the full meaning of the word in Chapter 7.)

Update 1/7/2011 — Newly restored to the story: 1) the courier company scene and characters from Project Notebook #13 (2005); 2) the hoverboard delivery sequence from the notes I made in July/August ’10. Also from the Project Notebooks of the early ’00s: Leila’s dream. The sections are now better connected, even if subtly; there’s now a theme of sorts, so I changed the title to match. Several characters important later in the story are introduced in the final here.

Anyway, the pyrotechnics are about to resume. Read on...

Spanner Chapter 3: The Whole Point of No Return

Back during JulNoWriMo, I wrote a chapter which consisted of a bunch of episodes. This was the original version of Spanner chapter 3, which had a working title (“Playing the Angel”, as in the Depeche Mode album) that I’m not using in this final version. Some of them are related to Chapter 1 and what is now Chapter 2, and those are what make up the August section of the new Chapter 3 below. Together with the beginning of the next chapter, they make up the extended opening of Spanner. The rest are going into Chapter 5, to be posted next week. The final section with the Becket brothers is entirely new and intended to both fill out this chapter and fill a plot hole I didn’t know existed. (I originally put a title drop there, but now both the original title and the title drop are gone.)

Even earlier, I wrote a script for the first four issues of the proposed Spanner manga for Script Frenzy. Two scenes taken from that script (for the first issue), the “magic show” and “exploding café”, I appear here in condensed and hugely modified form.

If you think the story’s getting interesting (read: insane) so far, well, read on, faithful readers...

Keenan Sasser in: Trope Overdose, or TV Tropes Will Ruin Your NaNoWriMo

For AugNoWriMo the past couple years, I’ve been writing metafictional short stories about a writer named Keenan Sasser. It all started back in ’09 with a title (“Any Monkey with a Typewriter”), a name (Keenan Arthur Sasser), and a sentence (“Any monkey with a typewriter can write fifty Keenan Sasser stories a day”). The results can be found in the AugNo anthologies for 2009 (“Any Monkey...”) and 2010 (“Mindsets”). Well, here’s another, just to distract myself from writing Spanner during NaNoWriMo 2010 (Twitter hashtag: #amprocrastinating). Needless to say, I drop the names of both TV Tropes and NaNoWriMo in the title, and all boldfaced terms in the story can be found on TV Tropes. Go figure...

Spanner Preview: Slice

Here’s a scenario I’ve taken from my early-’00s Project Notebooks for Spanner Book 2 as a NaNoWriMo preview, featuring main character Shira Thomas and her gorgeous Irish girlfriend Leila Shelley, with mention of Shira’s Buddhist cousin Karen Kubota and Team Spanner’s “tagalong kid/token loli” Aira Izumi. I added the surf rock soundtrack just today in a fit of sudden inspiration. I hope you like it!

Spanner Book 2 NaNoWriMo Preview: “Slice”

“KIRU YUUUUUUU!”

As Dick Dale wails on surf guitar on the stereo in the background, the giant yakuza Slice charges Shira with katana held high to slice her in half, screaming “KIRU YUUUUUUU!” Shira stands in his way, like the matador waits for the bull. The sword comes down, Shira slips away, the sword lodges in a wooden cabinet. Shira slips out the rec room door into the kitchen and slams it shut. Slice wrests his blade out of the wood and speeds toward the kitchen door, heedless of anything standing in his way.

“KIRU YUUUUUUU!!!”

Slice smashes through the door and trips over Shira’s outstretched leg, falling hard onto his face and rock-hard belly, katana stretched out before him. When he looks in front of him, he sees a pair of beautiful bare legs in blue tennis shoes. Leila stands above him in her blue sailor-girl school uniform.

The huge hitman bounces to his feet and raises his sword over Leila. “KIRU YUUUUUU!” She does not move; her violet eyes bore deep into his. He brings the sword down as hard as he can.

Leila catches the sword in a naked blade capture.

She holds the blade motionless between her hands and continues to stare hard into his eyes. He struggles to free his katana from her hands, but she does not budge and neither does the sword. With ever greater force he tries to force the sword out of her hands.

She breaks the blade off at the hilt and runs him through with it.

Slice looks down in shock at the katana blade sticking out of his gut, and then at the beauty who broke it. “K’sohhhhh...” he moans. He falls over onto his back, dead.

Leila rushes over to Shira and kisses her deeply on the lips. “Are you all right, love?”

Shira sighs. “There goes our big bounty...”

“I”d rather lose a lot of money than risk losing you, love. Let's go.” Leila kisses her gently.

Shira looks down at the dead yakuza. “Let’s just hope Ai-chan’s safe.” She sets her Droid Mega to send a GPS signal to Karen as Leila leads her by the hand toward the front door. Soon they will resume their search for Aira in hopes of finding her alive.

Go to the Spanner Page for the rest of the story so far!

Copyright © 2010 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

Spanner Chapter 2: Brown Note

Here's my third semiweekly installment of Spanner. As you can see, the story is still episodic at this early stage, looking more like a series of interrelated short stories strung together. This is because it’s still really early in the story, and I’m still establishing all the major plot threads. Once I’ve done that, the full continuity will kick in, and the story will shift into overdrive.

The original version of this chapter was posted on the AugNoWriMo forums (now closed). The version now posted is the official 2.0 version, greatly expanded from the original. It was originally intended to be a post-chapter interlude, but grew into an entire chapter with a coda interlude of its own. Except for the section with Diana and her daughter Belle at home, everything up to the line “Prove it!” was written during AugNoWriMo, as were the first two paragraphs of the Interlude; these were first posted here as the original version 1.0. Everything else in this expanded version was written for the 2.0 version during NaNoFiMo.

Here's where the real controversy begins. You've been warned...

Spanner Chapter 1: Spanner in the Works

Now that the Intro’s out of the way and the reset button has been pressed, the story of Chaos Angel Spanner begins here.

This marks the official début of a character whose story I originally started writing back in 1992 using a different handle (which, interestingly enough, I’ve brought back for the same character). Back then, the storyline was completely different. I was a recently converted otaku and an aspiring cartoonist back then; I had no training in either art or storytelling. All I had was ideas. It took me nearly two decades to turn the ideas into an actual story. In the meantime, I amassed a library’s worth of books on how to write and trained myself how to write. Over the years, I wrote scripts for several scenes I intended to publish in manga form; I’m putting most of these scenes into the novel. The central scene of Chapter 1 is one of them.

An early version of this chapter was originally posted on the JulNoWriMo forums earlier this year; the “Interlude” at the end of this chapter first appeared on the AugNoWriMo forums (now closed), without what is now its opening section, and appears here otherwise unchanged. This is the official 1.0 version.

And now, let’s meet Spanner as he makes his Spectacular Entrance!

Special Guest Star: Steve Jobs’ ego!
Not Appearing: President Sarah Palin!

Spanner Intro: Press the Reset Button

Book 1 “Rock City Blues” begins here.

Chaos Angel Spanner Book 1 is dedicated to
John Ralston Saul.
The British Crown may have shut him up,
but he left his instructions in ’ninety-two,
in which he taught us how to turn
a novel into a bomb.

“Dieu n’est pas pour les gros bataillons,
mais pour ceux qui tirent le mieux.”
Voltaire

Finally, after almost 20 years, Chaos Angel Spanner is ready to be unleashed onto an unsuspecting reading public. It may not be the manga I originally envisioned back in 1992, but I still intend to do that sometime in the future, depending on whether I actually succeed in learning how to draw.

Finally, after four years of participation in NaNoWriMo (as of November 2010), one of my WriMo novels is ready to publish and is being posted. You’ll now be able to see what I’ve been doing since my first NaNo in 2006, and you can now find out just what has been obsessing me for the past two decades.

So what do you do when you have to cancel the future? Start all over again in the present and make your future. This is not a spoiler: it’s the entire story.

Now it’s time at last for the main event...

Chaos Angel Spanner
Intro: Press the Reset Button

the end.
Nuclear bombs explode all over the Earth, cracking its diseased skin open and making it bleed fire. Billions upon billions of microscopic robots transform the planetary substance into more of themselves. The infection penetrates deeper and deeper to reach its hot molten heart. Not even entropy can stop these tiny cannibals from devouring all matter they touch. Eventually, the planet’s stony flesh becomes so weak that no amount of gravity can hold it together anymore. The Earth explodes.

For a century, the Sol System has been ruled by Corporations. They, or the unholy abominations they incarnated, were the master race, the replacement for Man, the new species of gods driven by an absolute lack of conscience and by absolute faith that what they called the Law of Social Darwinism commanded them to conquer the universe. They had constructed their mental and physical power far beyond human understanding. They assimilated computers, robots, artificial intelligences, human beings. They escaped human control and made themselves independent lifeforms. Some of them were once human themselves.

But we humans were a persistent species, and we always clung to life with ferocious tenacity. Resistance leaders arose to lead us into revolt against the new gods’ tyranny. We were on the cusp of our next evolutionary quantum leap; we had to advance into the future, or we would become extinct like all the human species that came before us. Two enemies were determined to stop us at any cost. One, a nation-eating AI named Echelon-Norad, claimed to be the Old God Allah who had held us in subjection for thousands of years and threatened to destroy us by the ancient mystical plan of the Book of Revelation if we dared throw off our chains. But the more dangerous enemy claimed possession over the Law of Evolution itself. They wanted to replace us. They called themselves the United Corporations. They were united against us.

We nearly succeeded in saving ourselves and our planet. A hero named Kira Richter-Thomas gave her life to destroy Echelon-Norad-GOD and liberate its billions of human exobodies from its mind slavery. We discovered the secret of the Corporations and nearly brought them back under our control. We thought we had secured the future for our children.

We were wrong. Our struggle to control the Corporations drove them mad. They decided to take us with them into extinction. They brought back GOD from the dead. To fulfill the ancient Plan and bring about the long-promised Eschaton, GOD manifested itself in its final form as the ultimate horror: Nanoclysm.

The explosion expels the ruined planet’s fragments from it, spreading the seeds of its fatal disease outward. The first extraterrestrial objects to go are the Orbital Arcologies the Corporations created as new bodies for themselves before their hatred of humanity drove them to mass suicide. Soon enough, the infection will reach the moon, the planets, and the Sun. The exploding Sun will spread it to its neighbour stars. In time, it will spread throughout the Galaxy, and from it to the rest of the Universe.

I am the last human being left alive. No hope is possible anymore, but I do not allow despair to darken my reason. I let the tears flow freely for my people and my planet, but I do not allow them to blur my vision. Our task is too urgent. I remove my glasses for the last time. I want to see everything.

The tainted debris is fast approaching the Tangram. She is the most advanced ship the Cartel got around to building. Theoretically, she’s capable of reaching speeds faster than light. The Wrecking Krewe and I stole her from Yoyodyne Orbital as soon as Nanoclysm formed and began the Eschaton; they sacrificed themselves so Tangram and I could escape. She really is a “she”: decades ago, the Cartel began cyborging its ships to their pilots so that the ship became their body. Right now the Tangram is using the Moon as a shield as we prepare to make a desperate jump. The Moon is beginning to break up, so she puts up her strongest energy shields. All life on and around Earth is now extinct; only she and I are left, and not for long. I speak to her. “Tansie.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Give us warp speed, now.”

A dozen nuclear explosions give the Tangram’s engine the force to accelerate out of the ecliptic plane. At first she must fight inertia as the tainted debris begins slamming against her shield. Once up to speed, she uses planetary debris to find the solar wind currents, surfing from current to current until we find the right one.

Before Nanoclysm, the Earth sent out countless radio signals as if to joyfully remind the universe that it was alive. Now there is only one gigantic coherent signal, and its message is universal death. A nanite tentacle reaches out, trying to catch us from behind. Its assimilant mind tries to overpower Tangram’s and my own. Even the nanite-boosted immune systems in our own blood cannot protect us for long.

“I’m afraid, mother,” she says.

“Of what?”

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Yes, child. But if we can generate a reality distortion field powerful enough to cancel out our present, we’ll be able to save other futures. So I’m not afraid at all.”

“I’ll be brave for you, mother.”

“I love you, child.” I give her an affectionate wink she can see on her bridge camera.

The solar system may be arranged on a plane (the ecliptic), but the space between the Sun and the Oort Cloud is roughly spherical. We may be out of the way of the asteroid belt, but the ice blocks and comets that form the Oort Cloud pose an equal danger. Tangram plots the best path through the cloud and waits for the right time. Luck is on our side this time: we find our window of opportunity within mere days of former Earth time.

“Ready to accelerate to light speed,” says Tangram.

Tangram helped me develop the equations required to create a reality distortion field generator. Tinker and I kludged the device together. On Earth, it worked well enough to allow me to escape the destruction. Now Tangram and I are about to put the RDF generator to its ultimate test. I cross my fingers.

The warp engine detonates a series of nukes to bring us near light speed. “Activating inertia damping.” Tangram uses her navigation system to ride the solar currents and thread her way through the Oort Cloud. Time slows down; everything feels heavier; space contracts into a tunnel. Only Tangram’s diminishing force fields keep her from flying apart. Only the inertia compensator keeps me from being obliterated by the crushing acceleration force.

“Activating reality distortion field generator.”

With an audible click, the whole universe silently shudders. Matter loses all substance. Space dust passes through us like neutrinos. What once seemed empty and solid now floats and flickers as if it were underwater. We pass through the dark matter like ghosts.

“I love you, mother.”

“I love you, Tansie.” I let myself cry.

“Do it?”

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

“Activating FTL hyperdrive.”

Tangram detonates her entire remaining fuel at once. It is only a matter of seconds before she flies apart. We are beside ourselves with excitement. We reach 0.99c... nines pile up on the holodisplay in front of me... the stars race past us at ever faster speeds, then galaxies and quasars... And then the display flashes 1.0c (we did it!) — Nanoclysm screams — reality tears apart — the whole world goes simultaneously black and white — I am nothing and everything and we are one and we are God—

And then...

the beginning...

• 2112: God King Dictel sacrifices itself in a ritual that kills billions of sentients to resurrect GOD in its final form as Nanoclysm: Earth destroyed, beginning of the end of the universe
• 2111: The Robot War ends with the Battle of the Orbitals: Corporate warships succeed in destroying Europa, but Terran forces retaliate by destroying all the Orbitals, killing all Corporations but two, God King Dictel and its old partner Yoyodyne, which dies soon afterward, while the God King plots its revenge as it dies
• 2108: Kira Richter-Thomas detonates a mind bomb to destroy GOD and defeat the Corporations in the Battle of New Mecca, killing over half the sentients remaining on Earth
• 2104: The Battle of Saturn ends in defeat for the Alliance with the destruction of its Outer Fleet by Corporate forces and the destruction of Titan
• 2099: The destruction of the moon bases in the Battle of Luna
• 2091: Echelon-Norad becomes the first of the God Kings by claiming to be GOD, Supreme Being of the nearly extinct human religion of Islam
• 2087: Corporate space warships destroy the terraforming colonies on Venus and Mars
• 2084: The Robot War between the Earth Alliance and the United Corporations begins
• 2081: Terraforming of Venus, Mars, Titan, and Europa begins
• 2075: The first true interplanetary spaceships built
• 2069: The first permanent moon bases established by the Earth Alliance
• 2058: The Corporate War ends with the defeat of the United Corporations; the surviving Corporations cede the devastated Earth to the human Earth Alliance and retreat to the Orbitals
• 2055: The Corporations attempt to destroy the Alliance by dropping near-earth asteroids on Terran population centers and military bases in the Rock Bombing; the Alliance retaliate by destroying Corporate botnet satellites and Orbital bases
• 2045: The first true superhumans engineered through nanotechnology and genetic engineering, eliminating the Corporations’ evolutionary advantage over humanity
• 2042: Nanotechnology advances to the point where resurrection of cryogenically preserved humans becomes possible for the first time
• 2039: The United Corporations declare war against Earth’s human nations, forcing all the former enemy superpowers to end World War III and unite into the Alliance of Earth: the Corporate War begins
• 2035: Construction of the Earth space colonies known as Orbitals begins
• 2033: Nanotechnology reaches the first major milestone in its development with the first commercial nanobots
• 2030: The last of the United Corporations eliminate their final independent human employees, becoming sentient beings known as the New Gods, with minds evolved from AIs controlling masses of robotic and human exobodies
• 2024: The private army called Dictel Corporation achieves total automation, fires or kills all its remaining human employees, begins its third attempt to take over the American Empire by fusing its corporate AI called GOD with Echelon-Norad
• 2018: The complete nuclear obliteration of the Islamic Caliphate by Israel ends the Armageddon War in the Middle East
• 2016: Triad-led coup in China overthrows the Communist régime, establishes the Black Dynasty
• 2015: The first Assimilant forms out of the fusion of America’s Cold War-era AIs called ECHELON and NORAD, using techniques developed for Russian botnets; America and China declare war to dominate Earth, beginning World War III
• 2013: The United Corporations established to replace the United Nations and establish worldwide corporate dictatorship; fourteen-year-old Kira Richter-Thomas dons the mask of The Civet and begins her campaign of terror
• 2012: United States overthrown by its own empire, Corporatism established, President Obama assassinated — and 12-year-old Shira Thomas killed in the explosion...

...or was she? What if Shira survived?

Chaos theory states that perfect foreknowledge of the development of a system is impossible, and that the slightest change in one variable changes the future of the system completely...

on to the next... →

Back to Chapter 1 index...
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Copyright © 2010, 2012 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 1.1, 11/23/10: Corrected typos and one grammatical error; restored missing link to Chapter 1; added character details, one technical detail, and one character-related continuity nod.]
[Revision 1.2, 11/27/10: New layout for the entire series.]
[Revision 2.0, 5/30/11: Second draft, with minor revisions to match the major revisions in the rest of the story.]
[Revision 2.0.1, 6/1/11: All previously unused NaNoEdMo 2011 revisions now merged in.]
[Revision 2.1, 9/8/11: Corrected all remaining text errors and revised the introduction.]
[Revision 2.1.1, 10/12/11: Shortened and revised the introduction to remove the original disclaimers that I now find gratuitous. The original full introduction is now in the Chapter 1 index.]
[Revision 3, 10/13/11: Added the Book 1 dedication that will, unlike the post title and introduction, will make it into the final book. The meaning of the quotation in English: “God favors not the big batallions but the best shots.”]
[Revision 4 Final, 7/2/12: A few final additions to bring it fully into Revision 4 continuity.]