THE PREMISE AMENDED
Topic: Notes

An idea can be like a bush, it can grow so much foliage as to hide the trunk. Since the summer of 2008, I've idea upon idea, each one evolving toward something new, secondary characters becoming primary characters, new adventures replacing old ones, until it becomes so convoluted, it becomes a thick tangle difficult to navigate. It's time to break out the pruning shears, snip off some wild tangent branches, and get back to the core of the story.

The story . . . which is what?

The Temperance Well is about free will and theological determinism, and if the two are diametric or can be reconciled. The original idea had a godlike being that could travel through time as we travel through space, and having entered our dimensions froze time since the history of the universe was "his" past. The whole idea was that if someone from the distant future visited the distant past, then everything between those two events was certain to happen, if we make the premise that the past is immutable. It very may be, and this is the common sense on the matter, though there are some scientist that speculate that the past may be as chaotic as the future, in that if we were able to travel back in time, we would find events have played out not as we remembered.

To truly get a grasp of this, one has to consider a world-line, a physical interpretation of an object as it moves through space, like a pinhead leaving a trail of thread. In an universe with an immutable past, such world-lines are static and unmoving in the past, and wriggling about like worms in the future—if we assume that world-lines extend into the future, as they would in a predestined universe. In an universe with a chaotic past, the world-lines in both past and future wriggle about, which was the condition the old character Kha wanted—a condition that set up the stakes whereby such a state might create pasts where other intelligent species never came to be. That's one considered possibility of the true nature of the universe. But from our limited experience, the past has happened and the present is a temporal horizon in which the only paths to follow are ones that build the future; we cannot cross that horizon back into the past, and the future remains as nonexistent possibilities. That seems to be our intuitive experience with time.

But in a predestined universe, a person's whole life exists as this odd temporal world-line, from the merger of world-lines of ovum and sperm, to the unraveling world-lines of decomposition. But from birth to death, there is a four dimensional object that represents a person whose three dimensional shape is naught but a cross-section. If the world-line is not being built as the person move through time, then what is it exactly that moves along the world-line as the person experiences time?

And what is memory? Is memory what we experience when we turn out inner eye to peer down the world-line? If so, what prevents us from peering up the world-line into the future? Or do we? In a nonpredestined universe, perhaps with no set futures, our imaginations are linked to possible future outcomes. But in a predestined universe, should we not be able to "premember" the future? Or is the Present a temporal horizon we can’t see over? These are the questions that lace the concepts of this fictional universe. (As a side note, I believe that predestined or not, world-lines can oxbow or maybe intersect themselves. I'll leave you to contemplate what that means.)

And so the actual physical Temperance Well was going to be the result of the merger of the four Shards of the Wellstone, that mighty artifact built by an elder race from a prior universe made to draw together the two branes and thus create the Big Bang. And Kha's meddling in our affairs froze time and created a predestined universe . . . but I had no plans to make "him" the actual God. And if Kha's actions were like a being from the future visiting the past, then why not throw out the whole idea of Kha and the Shards and make the Temperance Well a physical object that actually has something to do with back-in-time travel?  This solves a lot of bothersome problems.

Kha: a godlike being has the problem that its inhibitions and inabilities are purely by the hand of the author and do not arise naturally from the rules of the fictional universe. It would be difficult to craft such rules that in turn ruled out the godlike being. Kha, then should not exist.

The Last Shard itself is merely a McGuffin, a plot device the characters are after. In this case, the alien species Jautoc and Apaxan are made aware of Kha's goals through the Elders. Both conspire to hide the shard in the Earth so that Kha cannot get it—why can't he get it, because I said so. If Kha can pluck hearts out of chests without reaching into the body, he should be able to pluck out the Shard from the core of the Earth. But I decided that he couldn't do that on the weak premise the Elders made the Drawingstone that way. And so Kha needed humans to destroy the Earth to get at the Shard, but the Jautoc and the Apaxan knew that humans would be loath to destroy their own world, especially since the Apaxan dispersed them helter-skelter into the galaxy and no one lives there anymore, but O! the fond memories that have since evolved into humorous myths no one takes seriously. If you see the problem with that plot as I do, then you understand why the Shard has to go.

No more Kha, and no more Shard. And the hell with it, let's toss out the Jautoc too.

So, what becomes the Temperance Well now? It has to be physical thing . . . a construction . . . a powerful machine. And one not rooted in some hyperdimensional flight of fancy, but in real science speculation.

It has to be a time machine.

It has to be the very thing that has been created to invoke predestination.

It is based on the Tipler Cylinder, a hypothetical device (of infinite length) that once spun up to near light-speed will twist up spacetime near it as to allow time travel back to the time when it was first spun up to near light-speed. That the niggling thing about back-in-time travel, if you use a super dense spinning cylinder or a wormhole, you can't travel back to a time prior to the use of the device as a time machine. I first saw the cylinder on a Science Channel show about time travel, but the cylinder or tube they were speculating about was of finite length. I don't recall the specific length, but the diameter was six miles. My question of why six miles is what stuck in my head.

For most of the universe—or at least the time span of concern to humans—to be predetermined by a person or being from the remote future traveling to the past, the machine has to built and engaged in the remote past. This would be more likely a machine of the Elders. And the caveat is that the gravitational stresses are so severe that any spacecraft the humans or the apaxan were to use would be destroyed. That means a special vehicle must be used. It's this Elder vehicle that replaces the Shard. The vehicle can transverse the Temperance Well and return to the past. The assumption is that the cylinder was built, and the vehicle was sent out at incredible speed to invoke time dilation so that it traveled to the remote future rather swiftly from its points of view, and like molasses running uphill for the point of view of the rest of universe (although like a black hole, it would probably be hidden by an event horizon). But wait! It's two of them. Because the Temperance Well Universe operates in a predestined mode, it has completed its mission. As soon as the strange Elder craft leaves the Well, it emerges from the Well. The younger version of it moves off into the distant future, while the older version has the job of defending its younger self from those forces that plan to stop it. History is caught in a temporal causal loop, and someone (perhaps Raum, as I need a singular villain) plans to break it. Or maybe he wants to prevent it from being broken by those who think it should.

This change to the change to the change means no useless plot-hole destruction of the Earth's environment or the need for the apaxan to save us. In this revamp, we head out for the stars and the apaxan find us. I never liked making we humans the beneficiaries to apaxan altruism, even though it was a selfish ploy to hide the Shard. I think giving them an ulterior motive to manipulate us was a good idea, the premise it was based upon was flawed. Now the relationship is new territory.

The Mercator stories were shots in the dark. Talk about convolutions. There is too much going on, enough for a season or two of a one hour television series on The Cargile Network. The only thing those stories had to connect it to the Shard was that Raum would do something to make Kariden chase him into the time dilated future. Sad to say, its mostly back story, with even more past back story planned! I enjoyed writing the stories, but in the back of my mind I kept asking what it had to do with The Story. I still want things to happen on Mercator. I still want things to happen between Raum and Kariden. But do I need the Ravens? Do I need Raum to be a warlord? Perhaps not.

The new structure revamps "Signpost"—I did have larger plans for this whereby in the sequel "Unsouled", Kha cleverly recruits someone to thwart Kariden's endeavors during his pursuit of Raum—so that the Elder vehicle is discovered (which version?) on the Cross planetoid. Which leads to Raum's eventual arrival at Mercator.

Lots of changes, I know, but my goal is to whittle the story down to its essentials, get rid of unnecessary characters, maybe meld some together. Do I need Codus Cosundi? Or Wisty? Or even the Rector. There are lots of aspects for me to contemplate and consider.

But first there is this damned spaghetti western, which might actually have something to do with this Temperance Well thing after all. If not for this side track, I wouldn’t have found the means to do away with the Shard.

 

You might say it's predestination.

 

Post Its
Now Playing: warrior soul
Topic: Notes

 

Sometimes I need a little help and the Post-Its are right there.

 

 

Mauhager's and the bazaar from The Raven.

 

And the Sea Breeze from Retribution.

 

 

 

Updates
Topic: Notes

I've decided to abort the short story "Presage". For one, its just not needed. I thought I needed some external background crisis/plot to mire Mil Kariden in, and pull him into this . . . plot. But it just seemed so much more of a, well, plot driven story than a character drive story, which is what I'd rather do.

"Presage" also adds more characters to tell the story than I need. I don't need another protagonist to drop in and then seldom be seen again. Plus Roco Bellero and Mil Kariden are very similar characters so it makes sense to stick with Kariden and wave good-bye and good riddance to Bellero. Even Bellero's sidekick/love interest had a lot in common with Kariden's growing love interest Daphia Ulden: both are hooked on venom, but Huula was much poorer.

This means some reshuffling of ideas. The overall concept is pretty much mapped out. What I have is a jumble of pieces that I have to put together. Some don't fit right, and some don't belong at all, so its a process of discarding what isn't needed and reworking pieces to fit. Because I had scenes imagined in "Presage" that I want to keep, I have to transfer those experiences (especially with the antagonist Raum) to Kariden.  And because I've removed a major convoluted background plot, I have to replace it with other actions that make sense and built from ideas generated in the stories presented on this blog.

Thus far "The Daughter" has been updated to reflect changes to the facial Raven marks, in that some are high-tech tattoos that recruits like Kariden recieve before being officially inducted by Raum on his orbital station. It makes more sense that you would send a group up than one at a time.

And "The Raven" is being expanded to show greater depth into Kariden decision to become a Raven.  I know authors are supposed to hack bits away, but after re-reading it months after writing it, it seemed partially complete. Plus I had an opportunity to weave in a central theme of the "Temperance Well", the question of fate and free will. I should have that up soon.

The Premise
Topic: Notes

For countless cycles the universe has been born, has lived, and has died, to be spawned again from the corpse of an unstable singularity—the Phoenix rising—and with each iteration came a loss of energy, a loss of matter and mass. Intelligent life rose and fell with them, and one such elder race in the universe prior to ours, realized that theirs would be the last one. Their universe would go on expanding forever, never collapsing back on itself. It would become nothing but a static sea of virtual particles, lifeless, and utterly void, with only the hope that after unimaginable periods of time, something in this nothingness would happen, that some quantum event would trigger a process of regeneration.

The elder race had learned the secret of escaping the death of their universe by pinching off a bubble of their own spacetime and allowing it to burst open into the next nascent one. And such a method would not be feasible when there was no way to determine the end of one universe and the beginning of another. They would not be able to keep the life-pod of the bubble inflated forever. They had to act.

They created a device, a multidimensional machine—we'll call it for the lack of a better term, the Wellstone—that once activated would generate enough gravity to start the terminal collapse of the universe. The elder race ran into opposition from another prominent race of beings that inhabited higher dimensions. They argued the universe should run its natural course, and that if the elder race's species was to end, then it was to end. The hyperdimensional's argument was met with war.

The war was millions of years long. Galaxies were consumed in the conflict, destroyed, solar systems flung out into the intergalactic void. The hyperdimes were losing. Though they had the means to submerge parts of themselves into three dimensional space, and to create physical bodies to interact with matter by shaping spacetime, they were not all powerful, and the elder race was clever enough to disrupt their intrusions and diminish their number.

It is generally unknown how many hyperdimes there truly were, but at the end of the war, only four survived. Bitter at their loss, they too would survive the Event and deal with the survivors of the elder race in the new universe.

The elder race knew enough to design and protect the Wellstone from tampering by the hyperdimes. It would be a device beyond the hyperdime's ability to physically handle. The Wellstone would repel their kind. The elder race sent the Wellstone via something much like a wormhole, but closer to manufactured artificial spacetime, deep into their future, into the heart of the last star to shine in rebellion against the moribund universe. Then they pinched themselves off and sped into the distant future, burrowed through the Event of chaotic space and time, and waited for the birth of a new universe.

The new universe inflated in a sea of eager radiation. Millions of years later, the bubble of the elder race entangled with the expanding universe (though their bubble can't be said to be of any distance away from the 'edge' of the universe as concepts of distance, space, and time do not exist beyond the horizons of spacetime 'enclosures', so it is not like two bubbles merging into one, but more like the states and attributes of both become closer to equalizing and becoming as one) and they made their homes in the dark clouds of gas and dust, making stars and designing solar systems.

The Wellstone? It was not meant to survive the Big Bang, yet the attributes given to it to make it impervious to the hyperdimes also infused a robustness the elder race had not considered. Instead of vaporizing, the Wellstone shattered into a number of fragments. As these fragments were attracted to one another, many of them coalesced into four remaining shards.

But these were not shards like the blades of shattered glass, these were shards of an multidimensional device; these were spherical, as blue-violet as gamma rays, imbued with mysterious powers. The hyperdimes sought the pieces.

Their first intention was to use the shards as weapons against the descendants of the elder race, but they noticed something about the new universe: from their point of view where our dimension of time is, to them, a dimension of space, the universe was a static, unchanging place. The very presence of the hyperdimes, and their ability to move through our dimension of time had the effect of freezing the world-lines, those passages spawned by three dimensional objects moving forward in time. Since they could travel the universe from its beginning to its end—and had in their search for the shards—their effect was as if a traveler from the deep future went back to the deep past, and so the whole history of the universe was set immobile because it was the history of the traveler, and to avoid paradoxes, the past became immutable.

The hyperdimes thought the universe should be alive in fluid motion, its world-lines dancing, with past and future in constant change. Instead the universe was before them like braided cable of hierarchical scales, looped and dropped on the floor, like a forgotten discarded thing.

But perhaps they could do something about this. Perhaps they could enliven the universe. Such a feat might even change the past of the descendants of the elder race. If they could alter the properties of the shards, perhaps they could unite them to put an end to this static, tempered universe.

They found three shards. The galaxies teeming with life, the hyperdimes found intelligence races capable of altering the three shards they had. The shards were kept safe and under vigilant watch by three of the hyperdimes.  Kha, the fourth hyperdime, set out to find the Last Shard.

But other races had found the Last Shard. They had also discovered the elder race's children. They had learned about the hyperdimes and the war, and eventually learned of the Kha's plans. They decided to keep the Last Shard from Kha.

Their survival depended on the temperance of the universe. . .and their gamble on humanity, that if guided right would see them through to victory, or if intrigued into Kha's plans, could destroy them all.

---

That's the premise. I hope it sheds some light on what the Temperance Well is meant to be in context of the story and the goals of the chief protagonist, Kha.

It also explains the art on this blog. The world-lines are to the left, and the Last Shard in the title image.

 

 

Thoughts on "Presage"
Topic: Notes

Yesterday I printed out what I had written on "Presage" and had doubts. Some parts were a chore to read, some parts weren't giving me the emotions I wanted to have, and some seem to be trivial information.

The odd thing about this is that it reflects that if I attempt to do something with a definitive plot, it turns to shit. All the work that I did on "Presage" was to flesh out the core of the story that I had been working on and which would have been included in the final drafts. I reread that and am amazed that I was already hitting all the notes I wanted to hit in something more off the cuff and stream of thought, and with much better flow. This section would have been Part 4, if I keep writing "Presage" they way I'm currently doing.

But Part 1, 2 and the unwritten 3 are really too far from the climax, and though they are ment to tell the reader something about Roco Bellero, I feel that what I wrote before tells a better story of who the man is without all the extra bullshit. Sometimes cheese and pepperoni are all the toppings you need.

So . . . what am I going to do with parts 1 and 2, with the volopter action scenes and the girl he had to kiss to get the message he had another job? I don't know. Maybe scrap them. That part of the process. Maybe rework part 1, because what was going on with Eckon and the human machines has something to do with the overall story.

But I like what I was doing before I meddled with it, so I'll have to pick up where I left off. After-all, do we really care how Roco gets to Mercator? Its what he does on Mercator that drives the other stories forward, (and in some sense backward.)

I already have 3800 words on it (and it will be titled "Presage") and will post when it's done.