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...
Back to Chaos Angel Spanner table of contents...
Back to Spanner’s World...

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.]

Pre-NaNoWriMo Progress, Part the Last

Okay, it's official, NaNoWriMo starts tonight! Since I got to stay home all day and no trick-or-treaters graced me with their disruptive presence, I took advantage of the opportunity to finish all the Spanner Book 1 chapters I'm posting in November. Every single one of them, from the Intro to Chapter 8: they're done! And shortly after I post this, Chapter 9 (the last one I did during JulNoWriMo and AugNoWriMo will be finished as well!

Finally, starting at (schedule change here) 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time, Spanner will cease to be a pipe dream for me and become a reality at last! The vision that has tormented me since 1992 will be ready for you to read in its final form. Of course, it won't be a manga, but you won't be disappointed. Not after 18 years of self-instruction in writing and 4 years of NaNoWriMo and other WriMos. At last, it's real!

My next post, after the Spanner prologue/intro, will be a NaNoWriMo progress report. My NaNo project this year is — surprise! — Spanner book 2. I won't rush into the word wars just yet. First I need to plot it. And to that end, at the stroke of midnight, I will perform my annual NaNo ritual of opening a fresh new pack of index cards. I intend to write at least 100,000 words this November. Plus, I intend to return to my drawing self-instruction that I've been neglecting since I first discovered NaNo, and post at least one drawing a day on my Posterous blog.

Anyway, back to writing...

Pre-NaNoWriMo Progress, Part 4

It's been a pretty tough process trying to catch up with my goal of getting the currently written portion of Spanner as close to finished as I can before NaNoWriMo begins. As I write this, there's just over a day left before NaNo begins. However, I only managed to get one new chapter finished. Part of the problem is that I restored a few omitted scenes to the story. Another is: names.

I had the biggest trouble with Chapter 5. There were a couple sections I decided to skip during JulNoWriMo, and today I found out why. You see, I had to invent names. This means creating all new characters, and assigning new roles to old characters I'd forgotten but brought back just for this chapter. (They'll be back in later chapters.) And so Chapter 5 was the only one I actually managed to finish. But creating loads of new characters nearly wore me out.

Well, I'm done with that now. No later chapter (at least in Book 1) introduces so many characters. The challenge now is to use the characters I've just introduced. I'll rise up to it, of course.

Now on to Chapter 6...

Pre-NaNoWriMo Progress, Part 3

While I was putting together Spanner chapter 3 this morning, I realized that the next few chapters (from 5 onward) won't really be all that hard at all. All it'll take is a little editing and a little rearranging, and they'll be ready for posting. These, of course, are chapters I'd already written during JulNoWriMo and AugNoWriMo. There's only a few exceptions, including one new chapter I'll likely be writing this weekend, but which follows directly from the ones I've written so far.

Still, I'll likely need to write some new stuff anyway, just to fill out chapters and fill in plot holes. I did just that this morning, with the last section of Chapter 3. But at least that's not as hard as writing new chapters wholesale and having to edit them to meet a deadline I've set in, say, the next few days.

I'll be pulling a marathon session in the weekend before NaNo '10 so that I can have all of this month's chapters finished. I don't want them to get in the way of my NaNoWriMo, after all...

Cedric and Willa in: Revenge of the Badfic Merchants

NaNoWriMo is approaching rapidly, so I figured I'd whip out another "Cedric and Willa" short story, in which those glamourous and gleefully incestuous fortysomething siblings get into the "write 50,000 words and you're a winner" spirit. Both of them can write up a storm, of course, though both of them together could never match even a fifth of Kateness' November output (for those who don't know, that's somewhere around a million words or so).

But it's not all plotbunny-munching happiness in NaNoLand. Cedric and Willa have enemies, rivals, and ex-friends who write, too. Badly. A few are creative writing professors, or at least write in order to become creative writing professors. Others ghostwrite for right-wing media celebrities such as recurring character Bram Savage. The problem: our protagonists have much more trouble getting published than those two groups. But at least they complain about it entertainingly...

Note: NaNoEdMo is also mentioned in this story. Just so you know.

Pre-NaNoWriMo Progress, Part 2

While I'm preparing to start posting Spanner book 1, I'm of course agonizing over the editing. Yesterday, I did pretty much nothing but agonize. But once I left the house and started using a library computer, Chapter 1 all but completed itself. Everything is now done except for the last two of the sections I completed during JulNoWriMo, including the main action of the chapter, and of course for the necessary editing. When I get back to my own computer, I'll have it ready to post. That's the easy part.

The tricky part comes after I'm done with chapter 1. I still haven't started the complete rewrite of the second half of the Intro. That's the backwards timeline from 2112 (the science fiction universe cancelled) to 2012 (the present day, or at least "twenty minutes into the future"). I've got a few index cards with me; I can plot it out on the bus. The hard part is figuring out what events I want to put in the timeline (leading from the 2012 coup to the end of the world in 2112) and when they occur. The easy part is transcribing them into the Intro itself.

Now I'm off to write and plot. I'll continue to post my progress as NaNoWriMo fast approaches...

Pre-NaNoWriMo Progress, Part 1

As you may already know, I've decided to Spanner page 2 for this year's edition of NaNoWriMo. This gives my schedule some extra urgency: due to my usual procrastination, I've delayed actually writing or editing book 1 till almost the last minute. But at least I have some progress to report. The first three chapters are almost out of my hair.

Chapter 2 is finished and scheduled for posting on November 8. Today, I finished editing part 1 of the Intro — the part in which I destroy the world with a "nanopocalypse" in a future about to be cancelled entirely — and I'm getting ready to write the "rewind history" part. That leaves Chapter 1 for some editing with some necessary research (concerning locations in Manhattan, necessary for a recluse living on the opposite side of the continent). I hope to have a few more chapters written and/or edited in the final-week homestretch before NaNo begins.

I'm still on track to get the story posted. For once, you'll actually be able to read what I'm writing.

Stay tuned...

NaNoWriMo 2010 Approaches, Spanner Shall Be Written

It's been a while since I've posted here. But it's not that I haven't been working on Spanner — just that I haven't been writing it. I lost AugNoWriMo yet again, this time because I got obsessed with TV Tropes and limited myself to writing a huge list of tropes that fit Spanner in a now bloated MS Word document rather than writing any actual story after the middle of August. Now NaNoWriMo approaches, and I find myself having to replot and try to finish Book 1 while I'm plotting Book 2. Now that my TV Tropes obsession has died down, I can finally get back to writing.