Panthropolis Times

Read after Episode 15. Here be spoilers.

Gratuitous is one of those words that, in most people’s heads, just translates to “the bad stuff.” I wanted to refer to Fight Bar as gratuitous violence, but that made me consider the actual meaning, and whether you could apply that term to superhero violence in general.

Officially, gratuitous means “with no reason,” as with a gratuity. I suspect that most people think that the word is derivative of gratification. The problem with trying to use the word that way is that all entertainment exists for gratification. Is Bridgerton full of gratuitous drama? Using that definition devolves into tedious arguments around whose taste in film results in behavior harmful to society. I don’t like it, therefore you are morally obligated to also not like it. It’s the American way.

Sticking to the “pointless” definition, in most cases where gratuitous is applied, the sex and violence is the purpose of the film. If you aren’t watching John Wick for the fight scenes, there isn’t a lot to recommend the series. All martial arts films are like that. Any serious contemplation of the term must set aside cases where the expressed purpose of the video is sex and violence.

An obvious case is where a director thinks that “insert violence here” is a viable narrative technique. We see copy-paste fight scenes characterized by ad-hoc environments, unoriginal techniques, choppy cuts, and tight framing. It’s not necessarily purposeless, though. It’s just badly done. Artless.

Maybe a better case is violence that doesn’t relate to the story. You expect a bit of violence in a spy flick or a heist, but slotting a punch-fest into a slice-of-life drama can be jarring. The worst case of this I’ve seen was a French film that included two overweight guys slapping each outer around in slow motion while obviously bouncing off of a plexiglass wall. Interesting to watch, but it did nothing to advance the plot-line.

I think the gold standard for gratuitous is where the film makers throw a brief glimpse of bare breasts into a film to get an R rating, increasing a film’s revenue. It’s common to contort an entire scene around that one opportunity, briefly side-tracking the narrative for a single half-second shot. I can’t say that I don’t enjoy such shots, but they do nothing to advance the story line.

Advancing the story line is the key take-away here. If the story involves overcoming punch-happy goons, then violence isn’t really gratuitous. If gun-wielding enforcers are one of the hazards of our heroes’ jobs, then the violence serves a purpose. If acts of war are a natural part of the backdrop, then they belong in the story.

For the superhero genre, the entire point is to give the writers an opportunity to show off superpowers, and superpowers are generally combat-oriented, or at least conflict-oriented. In that context, is it even possible to have gratuitous violence? I think that such things defy the definition, even if people are in the habit of using the word that way.

This scene was fun to write because it’s the first time the team has run up against a physical opponent that could make them break a sweat. It’s no fun to write a series where the main characters never really seem to get injured. I’ve seen numerous cases where the concept of a bar fight was milked for satirical value, and had fun envisioning an environment where bar fights were a polite expectation.

The Flash was one of my favorite comic books, mostly because it was vaguely scientific. Like all things vaguely scientific, it was inevitable that I find the edges. If you think too hard about it, you realize that someone who could even move double normal speed would be unstoppable in a fist fight. Someone who could move at the speed of sound could throw a rock through a tank.

Also, I never really bought into the idea of a speedster who didn’t have time for things outside of crime fighting. Barry Allen’s issues were cute, but not realistic.

My inspirations for Serpentine include one of Larry Niven’s Gil Hamilton short stories, where the scientist was looking for a way to reduce momentum, but wound up with a way to speed up time. The math doesn’t quite work out right, but it made for a decent mechanism. When she speeds up, her mass decreases, not quite proportionally. She’s still OP, but not so badly that she can’t be around people.

Another thing that speedster fiction does poorly is portraying how a speedster would effect the air. Take the trope where the hero zips back and forth to make it look like there were two people. If someone tried this, they would create a near-vacuum between the two locations. Leaving a room in the blink of an eye would result in a vacuum trail that collapsed with a deafening boom, shattering windows.

Water is around 800x as dense as air. At 250x normal speed, a brisk walk would break the sound barrier. As you approached the sound barrier, air would compress in front of you, making it harder to push against. You wouldn’t quite have the walking underwater experience because the air wouldn’t be able to get out of your way fast enough. I always wondered at what point the air resistance would exceed a person’s shoes’ grip on the ground. It would be natural to reach your hand forward, knifing through the air to push the air out of the way. At some point it would be indistinguishable from swimming.

Dealing with electromagnetic radiation was a fun math problem. If you sped up your frame of reference, how would it effect light? Certainly your eyes would receive proportionally less light. How would light behave if it had the same wavelength, but lower frequency? That one stumped me, so I decided that wavelength was a function of frequency, and the frequency was preserved, adjusting for time skew. When she got faster, the corresponding frequencies of light decreased.

This had a few surprising effects. Our vision only covers a single doubling of wavelength. Compare this to sound, for which we can perceive twelve or thirteen doublings. Just outside of the optical range, normal air is increasingly opaque. I interpret this like wandering around in a fog. At the fun extreme, the limit of Serpentine’s ability, normal light interacts with her like radio waves, passing through her.

Something I had to basically ignore was body heat. Really, this convinced me that I couldn’t be 100% physics based, even with my exception. A human body gives off about 350 btu. At a measly 20x normal speed, a body gives off as much radiation as your typical home furnace. Even worse, the light is in the part of the ultraviolet spectrum that causes cell damage. I do reference this aspect, but didn’t want people dropping dead from radiation poisoning any time she wandered by, so I limited the emissions to non-blinding levels. That’s where the rainbow flashes come from when she’s popping in and out of slowtime.

A second issue that made 100% accuracy untenable is oxygen. Humans need a shocking fifteen cubic feet of air per minute for normal ventilation. At speed, any room she was in would quickly be depleted of oxygen. This would provide an interesting limitation that I might explore in future fiction, but it’s not what I wanted from Serpentine.

A final influence that I’d like to credit is the movie, Over the Hedge. It was released in the same year as Hoodwinked!, and I particularly appreciated the difference in how they portrayed over-caffeinated squirrels.

Don’t read this until you’ve listened to chapter 9. Here be spoilers.

We’ve been inundated with people talking about AI, arguing about whether or not we can call it artificial general intelligence yet. In 1980, just before the IBM PC was released, a guy named John Searle published Chinese Room Argument. The gist is that you have a guy in a room with a book full of rules, and people pass paper with Chinese writing under the door. He doesn’t speak or read Chinese, but he can look through the rules and figure out which Chinese characters to pass back as a response. Today, this is vaguely analogous to ChatGPT.

Does he understand Chinese? Does the rule book? Is the rule book better categorized as a comprehension? Don’t try to answer this here. It’s a thought experiment, posed entirely for the purpose of bringing up questions for people to discuss.

Some people, when asked what they think about it, will respond, “That’s a stupid idea.” I think that this is a cognitive dissonance reaction, but can’t tell because that kind of person bristles at the thought of self-analysis.

The life-year as a monetary unit is one of those thought experiments. The premise is that you calculate what it costs to keep a human alive for a year, and then peg your monetary unit to that value. This gives you a dollar that is 100% inflation-proof, but the important part is where you realize that you can start thinking of how much things cost in terms of how much life is consumed in order to create them.

The first issue that comes up is “how do you adjust for quality of living between different cities.” We currently have that problem in the US, when remote workers in Hickory, NC take remote jobs posted in Los Angeles. They deal with this in one of two ways. Either they adjust the pay scale for where you’re living (very unpopular), or it pours money into the underprivileged areas, equalizing the cost of living between geographical areas (also unpopular).

It further complicates matters when the underprivileged areas that you’re improving the quality of living for are in India or Mauritius. The idea of raising the quality of life for people in other countries is like poking a hornet’s nest. This is the kind of conversation that you can’t have in polite society because people don’t want to admit why they are opposed to it. It gets even worse when you ask if the same factors apply to Hickory, NC.

I had to think a lot about how a life-year converts to US dollars. I started with a living wage, but that’s adjusted based on how many people you are supporting and the city you’re living in. Given the variation between regions and the reality that each working person supports around 1.65 lives, I decided to run with US$40,000 for the year 2020. That’s a nice, round number that describes roughly what it takes to feed, clothe, house, keep healthy, and transport 1.65 people.

The thing that most appeals to me about the l-y is that, when you start thinking in those terms, it gives perspective to the cost/value of what we pay for things. Converting a life-year to US standards, you have to start with a living wage. A typical new sedan costs one to two life-years and is paid for across five years, creating a .2 life-year per year (LYy) drain on a person’s resources. The median 30 year mortgage generates a .86 LYy drain.

Things get even more entertaining when you talk about big items. The current US federal budget is $6.2 trillion. When numbers get that big, it can be hard to think in those terms, but it we can think about it spending .46 LY per person. The world’s biggest toy, Jeff Bezos’s yacht, reportedly cost only 12,500 LY. Imagine one person working on a boat for twelve thousand years. Noah would be proud, having only lived to 950.

I could go on, but this is a thought experiment. It wouldn’t be a very good thought experiment if I could describe all of the facets in a blog post.

This post is spoiler-light. It doesn’t reveal any plot details, but it does describe the deeper logic behind the Children’s common capabilities. There might be a few “oh, that’s why that happened” points in here.

I can’t help but notice that The Three Gifts sounds like cheesy crap that an amateur writer comes up with. It’s the kind of mumbo-jumbo that gets thrown in to make something sound mysterious. How did that get past basic editorial common sense?

The Gifts hang a lampshade on things that are generally ignored in action films. Communication issues usually just confuse the audience. Action films would suffer if the heroes needed a long healing time between action scenes. Watching someone heal is boring. There are only so many times you want to do a “find the portal” story arc. Really, one was enough for me.

The standard practice is to ask the audience to suspend disbelief, but I don’t like to pretend that these things don’t exist. It takes the fiction an unnecessary step further from reality. Ok, it’s hard to say if telepathic translation services are more realistic than every alien in the universe speaking English, but I’m pretty sure my way is more fun.

Passage

Clempson’s original life story took place in the Everyway RPG, where portals mostly gave the characters access to an infinite variety of settings. This suffered badly in the translation to science fiction. The challenges in the translation of the portals themselves defined a lot of the requirements of the Gift.

The biggest difference is that all of the worlds are full planets, not just isolated magical kingdoms, and the tech level ranges from modern day all the way back to the stone age. I could have dozens of portals on each planet, but that mode tends to smear storytelling across many worlds, and I love me some world building.

Thus, portals wind up being a couple thousand miles apart, and travel between them can be as treacherous as the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The absence of fantasy-world tech-stagnation also means that the portals have to be able to move as civilizations rise and fall. They have to stay close to major population centers, but not too close. Non-Children have no way of sensing the portals, so the Children would have no maps (and no magical bazar to sell those maps) or local rumors to follow.

Given these limitations, it became necessary to let the Children sense them from at least as far as the next portal over. An experienced wielder of Passage can find a portal across an entire continent, even across trackless jungles. After a few centuries, they can even sense a path that avoids the trackless jungle. Eventually they figure out that they can use Passage like GPS, and never get lost again.

The need to move around required me to make the portals sentient, and aware of the planetary empires. They aren’t above hiding when they think the Child should stay in a world. Passage has therefore become a method of communication with those entities.

Vigor

Vigor is the most straightforward of the gifts, but still provides a few surprises. If you watch a lot of action flicks, you’ll notice that the speed of healing is only limited by the audience’s attention span. Broken arms and bullet wounds can be gone in a matter of days.

I took a swag at the healing speed in most action flicks, estimating that most injuries heal in about ten times the normal speed. For me, this is as realistic as guns that never need to be reloaded. Nonetheless, bed rest isn’t very heroic, so I hung a lampshade.

My universe has a hard limit on which abilities can break the laws of thermodynamics, so I decided that Vigor used a Maxwell’s daemon style mechanism. Healing is the end product of a great deal of Brownian motion, so all it takes to speed it up is a ludicrous amount of luck.

Preventing pathogens was tougher. You need something that can differentiate between harmful and beneficial bacteria, for instance, so having a complex intelligence behind the gift became unavoidable. Not necessarily sentience, mind you, but definitely intelligence. The same intelligence differentiates between the alcohol required to get drunk and the alcohol required to blind someone.

The intelligence keeps a snapshot of the Child when they first passed through, and usually works towards keeping the Child in that state, minus any maladies, deformities, or age-related deficiencies. It cures arthritis, will regrow lost organs, and clears up mental degeneration.

The surprises come in when you apply Vigor to beneficial changes. When you work out, you build muscle. That’s a healthy change. I always wondered how Phil in Groundhog Day could learn the piano if his tendons and neurology reset every day. Vigor considers these kinds of changes to be within the range of healthy, but will consider the normal muscular damage sustained during exercise to be something that it needs to repair. This makes muscle building and physical skill acquisition significantly faster for Children.

Tongues

Star Trek’s universal translator and the Babel fish are crude solutions to the language problem. I didn’t want to go that way simply because it ignores a lot of the complexities of linguistics that I find fascinating.

Tongues allows a Child to borrow another person’s understanding of a language. This distinction means that the Child is incapable of mis-translation with the person they are borrowing the language from. The linguistic kernels are directly translated into words that mean exactly what that person thinks they mean. Tamarian metaphors would pose no obstacle.

This doesn’t mean that it ensures grammatical perfection. We’ve all had cases where we hear someone say something, and know what they mean, even though a conscious parsing of the words suggests something different. Listeners who are not the borrowee will have variable results.

To further complicate matters, Tongues guarantees translation into words that mean the right thing, but the Child’s own expectations of language can taint how the words are presented. Tongues does nothing to erase accents, and has limited benefit for providing instruction on how to pronounce difficult sounds. Every Child needs to learn how to click and cluck.

There are a couple of unexpected implications for this. The first is that Tongues has to work for any language. It’s basically a telepathic code-cracker for human information exchange. It doesn’t even require the language to be a spoken one; it just requires that the person doing the communication be within range, and that they are intending to communicate. It can’t translate code words, but something like Morse code is a snap. Given a little exposure, they could translate Bridge bidding signals and Baseball hand signs.

Another side-effect is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. SW suggests that we have a hard time thinking about things that we don’t have words for. If you turn that on its head, having an extra language should then improve your ability to turn ideas over in your head because you have more avenues. This linguistic perspective also allows skilled Children to tell when they’re within range of someone whose language understanding they’ve been exposed to.

Why three?

Three is a magical number…holy trinity…tripod…triple redundancy…ick. I could make up a bunch of stuff about the significance of threes but, really, three is the number I needed. Two wouldn’t have been enough, and four would have been too many. Five is right out.

I’ve never been happy with how these capabilities generally get glossed over or taken for granted. I hope I’ve presented a new and thoughtful twist on these Stock Superpowers.

This might be a bit obscure if you’ve never written software. Short version, when a chunk of code runs into a problem that it can’t solve, it sends a memo to its boss. This is called “raising an exception.” The upper-level process will give an order like “go get my car,” and if someone down the line notices a flat tire, the process that notices the flat tire lets the upper process know that his car will be late.

One of the challenges of AI is to figure out how to span the gap that exceptions will need to jump when transferring from machines to humans. What will the interface look like when you have a hundred machines under your control, all of which have something that needs your attention? Could that be exploited, merging computer viruses with memetic ones?

While talking to my daughter (who is learning programming), she asked me why she can’t throw and catch an exception within a function. For those who are familiar with the topic, you might think that this is a “my daughter’s so dumb” joke, but she’s not dumb. It’s just something that she never really knew the purpose for. She thought it was weird that the teacher wanted her to write code that way.

It occurred to me that this is a good example of common sense, but not something involving what we normally think of as common experience. When are programmers told what the purpose of this is? For me, it’s in the nature of the word “exception,” but I think I just learned by having to catch so many of them. For me, it’s like someone who doesn’t understand a punch.

The point, I think, is that some of the hardest things to teach are the things that we think others should already know. I think that this has immense implications for diplomacy, but it will definitely inform my teaching methods.

Just as an excuse for including it in the blog about my book, I thought I’d mention that this is the driving factor for Rikmon asking Clempson to teach him perceptron matrix theory. Rikmon has read all the books, but needs a real thaumaturge to relate the common sense.

Here is a preview of chapter 1 of Book 2 of The Fermi Project. Not necessarily the final version, but close enough for a preview. I have the first draft of the book on the ropes, and should have the second draft hacked out by first quarter next year.

Ch 1: The Valley of Regrets

After a century and a half and twenty thousand miles, Clempson still hadn’t been able to put this place behind him. Maybe he needed to see if he had done any lasting good for this world, or maybe he just craved an end to the story. Either way, he was drawn back to the valley of regrets.

Eight hundred years had passed in this world, suggesting a backslide from the iron age he had fostered. He found the watch tower that overlooked the city abandoned, one wall collapsed where a cliff had eroded underneath it. The precipice gave him a good view of the remnant of the city below. The forest had whittled it down to a fraction of its former glory, and the three-story palace on the hill was just a pile of rubble.

Anger and grief swelled in his chest, but he pushed it down. This is catharsis, he told himself. He’d have to learn their oral histories to understand what happened after he left. The bard he’d shared his camp with sang of the Night of Terror, when the emperor went mad and killed thousands, but he was pretty sure that there were no more than a couple hundred in the palace that night. 

Time had boiled his memories down to a few burned-in certainties  and gruesome flashes of bodies being shredded by his deathwalker. He took a deep breath and ran his hand over his bald head, pushing the images aside. He’d have to do some meditation in the ruins to drain the power of those memories, but it wouldn’t do any good to mull over them now.

Perhaps he had been mad. He wanted to believe that his rage was a side effect of the poison that they used on him, but it’s also possible that years of frustrated suspicion burst like a damn after he’d been betrayed by those he loved most.

His thaumechanical mule and cart awaited him outside of the tower. “It’s now three hours and twenty minutes after noon,” its reeds clicked in Munk Nonotone. “Did you find anything interesting?”

“Yes,” Clempson clicked back. He gave the mule a summary of his observations, knowing that the homunculus would record what he told it on thaumaturgically coded spools of silver wire. “End report.” He climbed into the saddle and put his helmet back on. “Let’s go to the school.”

“Are you sad,” the machine queried. “Would you like me to play a song?”

“No, thank you.” It comforted him to travel with an entity with worse social skills than his own, but this wasn’t the time. “Discontinue banter until further notice.”

The machine whinnied its recognition of the command.

The absence of traffic on the road confirmed his suspicions about the collapse of trade. Halfway down, he took a side path that led to a meadow where a partial ring of granite columns rose from a field of waist high grass. His aqueduct ran across one side of the mountain above the meadow, its graceful stone arches showing little sign of erosion.

The aqueduct was where it all started. The valley needed water, so he built them an aqueduct. Simple, right? He should never have gotten into government. Maybe he shouldn’t have stayed at all.

When he entered the circle, he was surprised to find a marble statue of himself in the center. A copper plate on the base read, “Aquius, God of Aqueducts” Not a bad likeness, and they got the embossed sigils on the armor right. He considered his current armor, deciding that he’d need to change before anyone saw him. 

A synthetic braying emanated from his mule. Clempson looked and listened, but didn’t find anything out of place, so he walked back to the homunculus. “What was that?”

The munk tapped a hoof on the ground, reminding him that he’d disabled commentary.

“Mule, resume banter.”

“That was the widder clearance alarm.”

It took Clempson a moment to remember what that alarm did, but then his stomach sank, and he shouted,  “Emergency protocol aech!” The alarm existed to warn him if anything might bump into the mule’s four-dimensional constructs, but it hadn’t triggered since he’d tested it. There was nothing out there.

Nothing but Hellian voidships.

Clempson hadn’t mastered four-dimensional engineering, but he understood it well enough to use it to hide things. The mule detonated the explosive coupling that attached it to his cart, and the saddlebags dropped to the ground. Abandoning its semblance of the equine, its carapace expanded and ports opened, internal components shifting to and from the nominal volume. The saddle and gimble vanished, launched into the droit volume to be replaced by a machine turret. It was going to take him forever to reassemble it all.

His mule could take out an entire phalanx if it needed to, but he’d seen the craters that Hellians could make. Most of them just amused themselves with questionable trade practices, but there were tales of roving bands that would treat civilizations like their playgrounds, or loot and run. Their ability to cull magic and technology from other worlds made them hazardous under the best of circumstances.

He popped the bindings on his cart and hefted his versatile weapon, alert for any shift in the environment. A breeze rustled the tall grass that grew on either side of the stone roadway, but otherwise all was silent. The saddle assembly startled him by reappearing on the nominal plane and clattering to the ground. Did voidships make a sound?

Twenty feet away and six feet up, an axe head faded in and fell, soon followed by a skeleton. Worn olive-green clothing materialized around it, and then the rest of a woman appeared as she dropped and rolled, keeping her halberd in hand. Hellian paratroopers?

He leveled the shotgun end of his weapon at her while four more people fell out of the sky around him. Their rumpled clothing looked to be made of natural fibers, and their pasty skin lacked the distinctive sunburned hue of Hellians. He relaxed a little with the hope that these might not be technologically advanced supremacists.

“Which of you is in charge,” he demanded. He knew they wouldn’t understand him, but his tone conveyed confidence. He relied upon his helmet to hide his worry and uncertainty.

A woman to his right, tall and dark-haired, wearing a baggy shirt and pants with a muted green and brown floral print, replied something like, “Omlagus garfungiloops rics,” while pointing a tube at him. 

Pain flared in his head as the gift of Tongues made room for their language, but he maintained his angry scowl and held up a finger, stating, “You aren’t going to understand this, but I have to keep you talking until I learn your language.”

The tall woman growled something to the man to Clempson’s right, a short light-haired man wearing denim and plaid. The man replied and their language coalesced in Clempson’s mind, comprehension of their previous statements spilled in. “Are you the builder?” “I thought you said he would know our language.” “Maybe you can get your own intel next time.”

They weren’t speaking Hellian tradespeak, but they couldn’t be mistaken for friendly. “Who are you, and what do you want,” he demanded.

The short man shot an energetic “Ha!” at the woman.

She ignored him and addressed Clempson. “You’re definitely the Builder. We need your brain.”

“I’m using it.”

The shorter woman scowled. “Not that brain. The mechanical one.”

“I’m using that one, too. You haven’t answered my questions. What problem is that brain going to solve for you?” Their lax posture and poor discipline ruled out an organized military. “And while you’re at it, tell me where you stole the voidship.”

The woman exchanged worried glances with her compatriots, and then everything went to hell, figuratively speaking. A loud crack behind him heralded a spike of pain in his left shoulder. He blew a hole through the woman in front of him before falling forward, getting out of the way of what came next. 

Bright flashes told him that his mule had just eliminated whoever had shot him. Clempson rolled onto his back, agony engulfing his arm. The short woman raised her halberd, but before she could bring it down, a blue-green bolt split his vision, leaving an after-image of a blinding ray of light passing through the woman’s exploding head.

The tall woman yelled, “Assholes!” and ran away. An amorphous white blob materialized around his mule, enveloping it.

Clempson used his weapon like a crutch to push himself to his feet. The two remaining not-really-Hellians were running towards the blob. Blue-green flashes lit it up from the inside, and bolts cut wildly through the air, blowing the remaining man in half, but stopped after five shots. This worried Clempson — the gun should have worked for at least twenty. The bubble must be gumming it up.

The earth shook and a puff of air blew past him. Dozens of white cords extend from the bubble to where a ripple shattered the air. A metal box the size of a small barn materialized at the other end of the cords, with an entrance like a hangar door. The remaining attacker jumped into the hangar and the cords dragged the bubble along the ground.

Clempson limped to his cart, each step driving pain through his shoulder. Blood dripped from his limp left hand. The leather strap that secured his toolbox to the cart resisted his clumsy, one-handed efforts, so he dug for an edged weapon.

An orange explosion blew a hole from inside the bubble. It didn’t feel prudent to equip his mule with an overload capacitor, but the munk must have decided to launch a rocket propelled grenade. A secondary explosion shattered the mule’s body. It wasn’t going to free itself.

Clempson flopped his weapon atop the chest and fired buckshot across the edge of the blob. Bits of white goo flew off, but few of the cords were severed. When he ran out of shells, he dropped his weapon and found the machete.

The best he could do with his injured shoulder was a weak trot, and the strands dragged the homunculus across the ground faster than he could move. The hangar door closed before he could reach it, and the big metal box faded away.

He collapsed to his knees, spots crowding his vision. Pulling off his helmet, he puked onto the grass and cursed in three languages. Damn them.

Survival first, he reminded himself. Nobody would come to his rescue. He harnessed his anger to drag himself back to his cart, where he used the machete to slice through the strap that held his tool chest to the cart, wishing he’d thought of that before he’d lost the mule.

With a whistled command, the lid of the chest popped off and sprouted six limbs. He ordered his trunk munkey to help him out of his armor. The shot had shattered his alchemically hardened wooden back plate and punctured his molten polymer underjerkin. He could feel metal and splinters embedded in his shoulder.

After chugging a strong draft, he used the munkey’s remote feed to pick lead and splitters out of his scapula. The gift of Vigor prevented him from bleeding too much or getting infected, but he had to stop twice to let the pain subside.

Each of the three Gifts had a downside. The flip side of the Vigor was that Children of the Gifts usually died violently. He didn’t age, didn’t have to worry about infection, was devilishly hard to poison, healed quickly, and even dealt well with sleep deprivation, but this didn’t leave many ways to die. Wanderlust, connected to the gift of Passage, ensured that he didn’t spend much time in the company of friends, and the Sympathy brought by the gift of Tongues made interfering with bullies an inevitablility.

The sun dipped to the horizon by the time he’d finished tending his shoulder, so he had to drag his cart to the fire pit in front of his statue, cursing the not-actually-hellians the entire distance. How had they known about the thaumechanical brain housed in the mule? What use could they have for it? Didn’t they know about the mule’s weaponization? Maybe it was the weapons themselves they were after.

Adrenaline aftermath kept him awake while the trunk munkey built a fire and prepared dinner, but blood loss and alcohol made the world spin dangerously. He had to keep moving and stay awake until he could get some food into him, so he dragged the three and two-halves bodies back to his camp and looted them. 

In between bites of ham sandwich, he found geometrically shaped coins, wallets, papers, and odd collections of cards, all showing the regularity of automated manufacturing. He also found a couple of metal and glass bricks, no more than a half inch thick. When he pressed a button on a brick’s side, the glass side lit up like a vid display, except in color, its surface covered in clusters of ideograms that he didn’t recognize. He’d have to crack one open after his arm healed.

In the flickering firelight, anger sizzled under his calm exterior. They didn’t just take his transportation — they took the culmination of the past century of tinkering and research. An artificial mind, spanning fifteen hyper-layers of thaumaturgical perceptron matrices, that approached human mental capacity while having access to a modular set of intelligences, sensors, and devices.

Everyone needed a hobby. By stealing his hobby they had made an epic mistake. Now he needed a new one. If they could travel between worlds without portals, so could he.

A flicker caught his attention — a brief reflection from some bit of metal beyond the dome of light created by his camp fire. The crisp lines of fancy robes faded in from the shadows. Clempson considered grabbing a weapon, but he’d already exhausted his ammunition, and was in no condition to fight. Fortunately the figure wasn’t dressed for conflict. The hemline wouldn’t survive a walk in the park, much less the rough conditions an hour’s walk from the local approximation of civilization. 

The robes resolved into a femine form, statuesque in stature and stillness, gliding over the rough ground as if she were floating. At first he thought that her complexion was an artifact of the firelight, but when she got close enough, he realized that her skin was an unnatural vibrant crimson, deeper than any he’d seen, even among Hellians. Even if it were makeup, her sharp features and black, silky hair were clearly Hellian.

Clempson played up his exhaustion. “Have you come to finish the job?”

The Hellian stopped on the other side of the fire and smiled. “I think you’re mistaking me for someone else. Do you need help?” She spoke in Panthroplean, so she must know who he was.

Clempson wouldn’t put it past a Hellian to stab someone so they could sell him a bandage. “Nothing that isn’t free.”

“Well, then, do you mind if I sit?” She spoke with a delicate lilt and soft trilling that felt to his ear like essence of lullaby, but fast instead of slow. Her robes resembled red oak, but hung and moved like fabric instead of limp rubber. It still gave her tall, thin frame the appearance of a wooden statue.

Clempson indicated a large log to his right, but the woman flourished, and the walking stick that she wasn’t using for walking unfolded into a stool. Nice trick.

“I’m afraid I have you at a disadvantage.” She sat and crossed her long legs. “I’ve been following your career since you built this thing.” She gestured upward at the arch of the viaduct, flickering red in the glow of the fire.

“I have a career?” Unbidden memories washed over Clempson. “Why would you bother having me followed?”

“I don’t have you followed. I just buy reports from your biggest fans. Do you have any idea how well Chronicles of the Children of the Gifts sell on the Hellian market? I purchased the rights after the first book, but if I hadn’t, someone else would have.”

Clempson didn’t have any idea. “Ok, make it up to me. Who are you?”

She smiled and spoke softly. “Call me Victor, Baron of the Ninth Circle of Hell. Don’t be too impressed — they have a lot of barons up there. I’m looking to recover a stolen cargo ship.” Victor glanced at the bodies.

“Victor. That’s an odd name.”

“It isn’t a name, it’s a title. You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to get people to call me that.”

“I’ll save that for another time. I bet you can tell me how they got hold of the ship. They didn’t seem competent enough to earn it.”

“They were competent enough to take your homunculus.”

“At the cost of four lives.”

“Lives are cheap on Hell. Your mechanical brain is probably worth more than the ship.” She held an open hand towards the corpses. “May I look?”

“Be my guest.”

Victor collapsed her chair back into a walking stick and approached the cadavers. She pulled one of the glass-metal bricks from the folds of her robe and traced patterns on the glowing glass side with a finger. A light issued from the metal side, illuminating the corpses. After digging through the clothing, she asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have found one of these, would you?” He waved her brick in Clempson’s direction.

“I might have. What are they?”

“They’re called gladdugs — compact information storage, communications, sensors, that kind of thing.”

It occurred to Clempson that he might be able to use Victor to retrieve his munk. “Will it help you find them?”

“Maybe. If one of them was receiving telemetry I could use it to track their departure.”

“Would you take me along? I’d like a chance to retrieve my property, too, you know.”

An exaggerated look of sadness crossed Victor’s countenance. “I’m sorry, but we’re not allowed to accept unbonded passengers. Would you take my word that I would return it to you?”

Clempson failed to hide his affront. “I’m sorry, do I know you? No, you have no way of convincing me. How do I avoid being an unbonded passenger?”

“That’s not advisable. You’d have to wear a security necklace at all times. Taking it off in any Hellian facility would be an instant death sentence. Is your machine really worth it?”

He had no intention of staying on the Hellian ship any longer than necessary, and knew he could cut through any collar they put on him. “That’s more than just a machine to me. It has the records of the worlds I passed through to get here. I might never find my way back home without it.” Clempson watched his trunk munkey add more wood to the fire and felt a wash of sadness. “It’s also the closest thing I have to a friend,” he mumbled.

Victor’s lip curled and she snorted. “Some people have imaginary friends, it figures you’d have built a synthetic one. Very well, but remember that I warned you.”

Warning: Here be spoilers. This is a brief description of how the 4th dimension works in my world for those coming in in the middle.

This is a 4th physical dimension, similar to that described in Flatland. In place of “up” or “down”, the other dimension has directions named “droit” and “widder.” Droid is from heraldry (and medieval Latin) meaning either “a right” or the right side of a crest, opposite to sinister. Widder comes from widdershins, an archaic word for counterclockwise, upstream, or the way it isn’ t usually done.

In the first book, I introduce the idea of the Hellians (and Mouse) having access to a 4th dimension. Mouse can use it to pass “over” walls, and the Hellians travel in ships that navigate it.

The second book takes place mostly on Hell, so I go much deeper into how it all works. Clempson has had three hundred years to figure out much from a piece of wood that Mouse gave him, and he used that understanding to build a mule-shaped homunculus.

The 3d space we live in is called the “nominal volume.” The Hellians only use the widder half of the 4th dimension because the droit volumes are full of space monsters. They call this widder-space. Everything that isn’t in the field of influence of a planet is a formless void that they call “the void,” and thus their ships are called voidships.

When things are thrown off of the nominal volume, they fall back onto it. This follows the normal Pythagorean formula for gravity. There is a transition cost when shifting from widder to droit, causing 4d motion to dampen instead of vibrating indefinitely.

If something “falls” onto solid material, it is blocked from entering the nominal plane and can get stuck. Air and water will just get out of your way. Hellians have figured out how to dislodge and displace solid material, but it’s like punching a brick wall. There is no air outside of the nominal volume. You’ll carry some with you if you’re thrown out, but otherwise, vacuum rules apply.

I’ll add more details if anyone asks.

It isn’t clear to me whether The Thaumechanical Man is science fiction or fantasy. It doesn’t fit cleanly in either, but neither does it bridge or mix the two the way, for instance, Piers Anthony’s fiction does.

The fantasy/sci-fi division is an old argument, often centered around the two strongest known cases: Star Wars and Star Trek. In Star Wars, the story itself could just as easily be told in a world with horses and swords and magic. The technology is part of the scenery, not part of the story. In Star Trek, the stories generally revolve around warp drives and phasers and transporter beams.

This quality works in the other direction, too. Case in point: The Warlock in Spite of Himself. In that series, what they call magic is actually telepathy and telekinesis, and the main character is from a star-faring society, and the plot line revolves around him figuring out how it all works. That one’s cleanly categorized as sci-fi.

It confuses things that neither Panthropolis nor the Third Empire feel like they have a higher level of technology than we do. Panthropolis is slightly more advanced than our world, but the time spent in researching alchemy and thaumaturgy have leeched from their research in chemistry, telecommunications, electricity, and a few others. This confusion clears up a lot when we get to Hell, as the Hellians have a tech level somewhere between Expanse and Star Trek: Enterprise.

A clear issue is the existence of magic. Is it even possible to write science fiction with magic? Of course it is. In Dune, spice basically grants magical powers. Telepathy and telekinesis are endemic to sci-fi, but I think that “it’s all just psychic powers” is as tired a trope as “it was all a dream.”

For this issue, I’m going to invoke “in the real world, magic is just a technology we don’t understand.” Electricity was once magic. Nanosurgeons would be miraculous to us. When the technology involves laws of physics that we don’t even have access to, you have to call it magic even if it’s as rudimentary as banging two rocks together. However, if you define it strictly enough, you can treat it like a technology. My goal with magics is to be able to describe each of them mathematically, if for no other reason than to reduce inconsistencies.

How the FX are accomplished, however, is all window dressing. What really matters is the story. Could the story be told if it took place in a fantasy setting? Sorry, no, that’s a red herring. I don’t think we’ve effectively established that it isn’t actually a fantasy setting, so this perspective doesn’t work.

You could ask if the story revolves around understanding the implications of the technology, but that doesn’t work, either. Most books with a rigorously detailed magic system revolves around the workings and implications of it (Raymond Feist, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Brandon Sanderson, et.al.).

It all circles back around to how you perceive the tech/magic divide. At the bottom of it, I wrote this conundrum into the story with my foundational assumptions about the world. Any magic, if sufficiently reduced to practice, is indistinguishable from technology. Thus, fantasy becomes indistinguishable from science fiction. If I did it right, this question should be unanswerable.

Alas, this leaves me with a dilemma. I don’t know how to categorize it, but Amazon needs a category, doesn’t it? I picked science fiction because my writing style is more resemblant of Heinlein and Niven than McCaffrey and Tolkien. Maybe you can help me out. Where do you think it belongs?

And what is with the Klingons? Remember, in the day
They looked like Puerto Ricans and they dressed in gold lamé
Now they look like heavy metal rockers from the dead
With leather pants and frizzy hair and lobsters on their heads
– Aurelio Voltaire, U.S.S. Make Shit Up

This form of inconsistency never bothered me, but it sure seems to bother a lot of other people. There were attempts to refer to the 60’s TV Klingons as Human-Klingon fusions, but I always found this to be an excessively complex explanation for something that was merely an artifact of an imperfect lens. If the film makers of the 60’s had better technology, then it would have come closer to later efforts.

This philosophy has a lot of impact on my writing, especially in areas where I have to translate concepts. In the second book, Clempson visits a place called Hell. Is it really the biblical place described in Dante’s Inferno? Of course not. That would be boring. It is, however, a very punishing place that is spoke of very poorly in any place where they know it exists. When shown through the lens of my writing, that’s the best word for it.

This is a standard literary technique that allows authors to create a richer world by harnessing people’s expectations. It’s why elves and goblins are so common. The pitfall of this technique is where the author relies too much on prior art. Elves that are tall, skinny, long-lived, pale skins with pointy ears and a haughty attitude. Goblins that are short and green-skinned with few smarts and fewer morals. Archetypes or stereotypes, it’s all still the Planet of Hats, the implication of mono-culture, so I avoid relying on it too heavily.

If I’m not going to lean on the stereotypes, then why would I include them? There’s more to the archetypes than cultural flavor. They’re also allegorical. I’m exploring the concepts of Good and Evil, as they exist beyond the concept of good and evil people. The second book isn’t about evil people, it’s about what makes people evil.