Short Story: Dead Days

 I was dead. That much was sure. On the bright side, it must have been painless. I couldn’t recall how it happened, and looking at the body, it was fairly recent.

“Mr. Crayne?” 

I jumped out of my skin…so to speak. I turned to see a rather average looking woman. Not “average looking” in terms of attractiveness. She actually looked pretty nice. But no wings or horns. No spectral glow or ethereal smoke. Just a regular woman. Standing in my office. 

“So… are you my guide to the afterlife?” 

“You could say that.” She looked at the office door, then her watch, then my body on the floor. “What do you remember?” 

I took a moment to try to recall what I had just been doing. “Nothing unusual. I was waiting for an appointment. The last thing I remember is checking Twitter. I think the client was running late.” I walked closer to my body and leaned over. The skin was still fairly pink and flush. There was a wet mark on the carpet by the desk. Wow. I really hope I didn’t piss myself. “Do you know how I died? Was it a heart attack? Dammit. All that healthy living and exercise and Eddy outlives me on a diet of burgers and fries and Netflix marathons. He is never going to let me live this down.” 

“Yeah. Ah. Look. I just need to confirm a few things. Are you Thomas Crayne, Licensed Private Detective in the district of California?”

“That’s me, formerly at your service. I’m going to haunt my doctor for missing whatever got me.” 

It was dawning on me that I was taking being dead remarkably well. When Carla Friedman dumped me for Manny Keisic in fifth grade, I cried for the entire weekend and ate a whole two litre tub of salted caramel ice cream while watching Jurassic Park on cable. That was a rough night hugging the toilet bowl. I wish I could say at least I enjoyed the movie, but it was the third one, not the original.

“Do you recall working with a Mr. Miguel Park?” The woman hadn’t moved from where she was standing. “It would have been several years ago.”

“I don’t know if being dead voids confidentially agreements, but until I know for sure, I can’t discuss anything about past clients.” I stood up and looked around the office. My phone was in its charge cradle. There was an almost full glass of water on the far side of the desk. The rim had a slight smudge of lipstick. I touched my lips, and looked back down at my body. Nope. Definitely not me. 

That’s when I saw a second glass on its side under my desk. 

“How did I die, Mrs. Park?”

“Your expertise is required, Mr. Crayne. The situation is…complex. I had to expedite the initial requirements of your employ. Time is a factor in this case. It’s already taken you longer to materialize that I was told to expect.”

“You killed me? I don’t recall agreeing to that, as a requirement for my employ or otherwise. I enjoyed being alive. I’d been practising for 38 years! I was just getting good at it.” I lunged at Joanna Park, but was abruptly stopped by a very solid, very invisible, very firm wall. Pain must have a psychological aspect. I was pretty sure all my nerve endings were lying on the floor, but my present form still felt like it had just run full speed into a brick wall without inhibition. I bounced back and found myself on the floor of my office, gasping for air through apparent pain. My face was right in front of me. 

I was breathing. I mean dead me. My body. My body was breathing. I wasn’t dead. Maybe?

Mrs. Park looked down at me. “I really need you to calm down. You’ll be returned to your physical body once the contract is complete, regardless of outcome. My team will be here in a few minutes to remove and store your body. Your consciousness has been discorporated and tied to this device.” She held up her left arm, showing what appeared to be a smartwatch. 

“Yours has a bigger memory than mine, it seems. I hope it has a better battery too. I have to charge mine every night.”

She turned towards the door at some noise from the reception area. Glancing back over her shoulder at me, she tapped twice on the watch. A green circle appeared on the screen. “Remember when I said time was a factor?”

To Watch A Show

 I’m not sure what to write tonight, but I’ve sat down to try to mash out my 150 words as quickly as possible, only because I want to watch the newest episode of the science fiction series Foundation that went live on Apple TV just a few hours ago. 

Is there anyone else out there that fits in the Venn diagram overlap of “Reads Denis’ Blog” and “Watches Foundation”? I never read the books it’s based on, but according to those in the know, apparently neither did the folks that made the series! Fans of the books tell me, while the show uses characters and themes from the novels, it’s like they read a Wikipedia page, got bored after the Principle Characters section and made everything else up. 

And I love it! It’s crazy far future sci-fi, with ships that travel faster than light, empires that span multiple star systems, clones, and math that accurately predicts the future, but only in huge, civilization spanning level, not the actions of individuals. 

The special effects are high budget movie quality, with huge cities, vast wastelands, and elaborate, shiny spaceship interiors. Much of the sets were built and filmed in Limerick!! There are plenty of Irish accents among the secondary cast, and plenty of Irish names in the credits for all sorts of roles. 

The cast is great. I think, among a quality selection, my favourite actor is Lee Pace. I love every time his character appears on screen and I’m excited to watch his plans and plots come together. That, and I WANT HIM TO DIE! I want him to die a slow and horrible death, and suffer for every moment of it. Oh how I’m going to enjoy that episode when it surely happens. 

If you enjoy sci-fi, think about adding Apple TV to your list of streaming services you’re borrowing from a friend. 

Though that might be tough, as there aren’t many of us around. 

Addendum: Well, I watched the latest episode and it was great. Almost no sign of Lee Pace, but with the size of the cast, not every actor gets to be in every episode. Can’t wait to see what happens next week. 

To The Stars!

Whether it’s Trek or Wars, there’s never been a better time to be a fan of Star stuff. 

I grew up enjoying both, but partly because Star Trek was a weekly show, I think I had a special fondness for The Next Generation series. Also, Star Wars was on hiatus during my formative nerd building years. I didn’t even see Return of the Jedi in theatres, but I distinctly recall being in the theatre with my brother and a friend at a matinee screening of Star Trek: The Undiscovered Journey. 

But tonight I watched the latest episode of The Mandalorian, followed by the second episode of the latest season of Discovery. In case you don’t know, The Mandalorian is a series based in the Star Wars universe, following the exploits and adventures of a lone bounty hunter, while Discovery is based in the Star Trek universe, following the exploits and adventures of the crew of a federation starship.

Both shows are drastically different, and this happy sci-fi fan has room in his heart for both. 

The Mandalorian is a western that happens to be set in space, leaning heavily into tropes defined by the golden age of westerns in cinema and TV. This includes dusty bars, lawless border towns, backstabbing former friends, running jobs to earn pay and delaing with unexpected hiccups to seemingly straightforward tasks, all while riding mostly alone across baren emptiness between episodes, picking up allies along the journey. 

Discovery is bombastic space science fiction, with huge battles, gibberish technobabble, shiny technology, epic, galaxy spanning life-or-death, end-of-the-known-worlds plots, starring a massive ensemble cast of colourful characters and adding to that by picking up new allies along the way.

Mostly though, I chose to write all this to bring up that I just want to see a crossover special where The Mandalorian’s Amy Sedaris and Discovery’s Tig Notaro characters get to meet up and hang out together. I don’t care how. I just want to see these two characters together! They’re hilarious. I feel like they’d be the best of friends if ever they got to meet. 

Expect my next dozen or so posts to be fanfic of just that!

Rogue One Ada Zero

Last night we watched Rogue One at our place. I hadn't seen it since the cinema, and Claire had never seen it. I liked as much as I did the first time, and while it's not perfect, it's still pretty amazing. At least it's better than the remake of A New Hope they put out under the title The Force Awakens. I love Baze and Chirrut, and K-2SO is a solid addition to the droids.

Rogue One also became the first Star Wars movie Ada has experienced, at least in part. She was awake when it started, and excited to see the spaceships and stars. But she fell asleep about half an hour in and I put her to bed.

I can't wait to show her A New Hope. She already recognises a lightsaber thanks to a story book she has about Return of the Jedi. It brought me no end of joy when, while in a toy store recently, she spontaneously picked up a lightsaber, held it to me, and said "whoom-whoom".

She'll make a great role-playing, board game loving, sci fi nerd.

 

Canals On Mars

"Hey Burke."

Burke pushed her hat barely an inch off her face. "Yeah?" From under the brim, she could just see her partner pointing to the skies above.

"See that star, right there. The red one. That ain't a star. That there's the planet Mars. You can tell, because it ain't moving like the rest of the stars. And it's red."

"Is that so?" she said, and let the hat slide back over her eyes.

John shifted on his coat, and Burke could tell by the sound of the grit underneath that he had rolled onto one elbow. "Yup. My dad told me all about it. Was readin' in the papers the other day that some fella in Italy seen canals in its dirt! Imagine that. Canals on Mars!" The excitement in his voice was boyish enough to remind Burke how young John probably was, despite the thick beard he chose to sport.

Burke kept her hat low. "What's a canal?"

"'What's a...'? Are you serious?" John said, and Burke heard him sit upright. "When you'd leave school? A canal is one of them manmade rivers for moving water and boats around. Manmade, Burke!"

Giving up on getting to sleep any time soon, Burke took off her hat and sat up, turning to the warmth of the dieing embers. "You're telling me there's men on Mars? Well that's great, 'cause there's too many of you down here already." Behind her, John was getting increasingly excited.

"No, dummy! There's aliens up there! Little folks that don't look like you or me, but have towns and carriages and probably cows too, I'll reckon." He paused, and Burke imagined him scratching at his beard they way he always did when he was thinking hard. John was great to play poker against. "Maybe not cows. Bugs. Big 'uns. Big enough to ride around on."

At this point, Burke had heard just about enough, but before she could say anything, she heard a loud ping from her coat. She turned to see John starring into the moonlit sky. The red "planet" had suddenly shifted and was now falling through the sky.

"That's weird. What do you-" John said, but the rest of his words were lost as his ashes drifted out on the cool night air. The ship came to a silent hover above the grass.

Burke holstered her raygun. "'What's a canal?' You fucking dumbass."

Almost Sleepy Agents

Ask me six months ago what new show I'd be most excited about watching every week and I would have said Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. without hesitation. Ask me today, and it's a different story.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is set in the shared continity universe of the Marvel Studio movies that include Iron Man, Thor and Captain America. Lead by Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), whose first appearance in Iron Man cemented him into the Marvel universe, the team is made up of two highly skilled field agents, Melinda May and Grant Ward, two scientists, Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons, and a civilian computer hacker and activist, Skye. They operate out of a mobile command centre in the form of a huge retrofitted cargo plane, stamped with the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo everywhere.

References to the movies are natural and common, with mentions of the greater organisation beyond Coulson's team dropped in regularly. While the series is unable to have regular cameos from the principle actors from the various movies, there have been some nice surprises, including Cobie Smulders in the pilot reprising her role as Agent Maria Hill, that give us hope that Robert Downy Jr. or Chris Evans might drop by for a chat in a later episode.

I'm really enjoying S.H.I.E.L.D. I understood from the before the pilot aired that I should expect something closer to Warehouse 13, and I'm loving that that is what we have. Some people are dissappointed that there aren't super-powered beings leaping all over the screen in every episode, but it's a TV series! And the first season. They don't have the budget to do that. Instead, the team investigate strange artifacts or weapons, and occasionally run into someone with powers.

The cast is strong, and the characters are becoming more defined. The writing is clever and sharp, and there's some great dialogue among all the action and tension. And in true Joss Wheadon fashion, there's a deeper mystery at work for the fans to follow and ponder over. Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is lots of fun, and some great weekly viewing.

But it's not my favourite show right now.

Originally, I pretty much ignored Sleepy Hollow outright. I disliked the premise: Injured in his own time, Ichabod Crane wakes up in the modern world and has to defeat the Headless Horseman in a strange, new land. It just didn't sound particularly inventive. But people kept telling me great things about the series, and then Claire started hearing about it and growing interested. Only one male caucasian on the main cast (two, if we assume Headless is one two, I guess), and, pretty early on, the writing staff realised what the fans knew from the seccond episode: Ichabod isn't the main character, it's Lt. Abbie Mills, Ichabods police officer friend who has seen and knows more than she's willing to admit.

So we tried out the first episode, and we both loved it! It's clever, very funny, and wonderfully cast. Ichabod reacts to the modern world in a real way, obsessing over electric windows and the number of Starbuck's within a block of each other. Big things like cars and computers seem almost too much for his brain to handle, so he focuses on the smaller changes, and it's wonderful. At one point, he's handed a pistol for his own protection and told "It's works just like the old ones. Point and shoot." I immediately smiled at the important fact that Abbie took for granted, and, sure enough, after firing once, Ichabod throws the gun away, thinking it spent. A great moment, well crafted.

The show is suitably creepy for it's source material. It's never gorey or downright scarey. It's just that subtle find of creepy that sends shives down your spine and leaves you wanting more, but maybe tomorrow, or next week. The end of the pilot is especially shiver-inducing. If you're a fan of the Dresden Files series of urban fantasy novels by Jim Butcher, then you'll understand when I say that the thing in the mirror at the end of Sleepy Hollow's pilot is how I imagine He Who Walks Behind should be portrayed in a movie or proper series adaptation.

Plus, Sleepy Hollow has Orlando Jones as Captain Irving (a nice nod to Washington Irving, author of the original poem), and he's always great to watch.

And then there's Almost Human, a sci-fi series filmed here in Vancouver staring Karl Urban as Det. Kennex and Michael Ealy as his android partner, Dorian. Rather like Sleepy Hollow, I was unimpressed with the lack of creativity from the trailer for this show. A human cop is injured and his partner killed when their police android decides that they are not a priority based on mission parameters. This leads to him hating on androids, bu being forced to work with one as an active officer. He's given a "defective" unit, an older model that displays too much emotion, and they bond. It sounds like something one of those automated plot generators would spit out:

He's a white cop with an artificial leg who hates androids. He's a black android who feels too much emotion. They fight crime!

And it does hit a lot of the generic clichés: A tough but kind hearted older female superior officer, a young, sexy collegue, a rival officer who thinks the main character is a has-been, and who thinks of androids as lifeless tools, and even a missing ex-girlfriend who may or may not be mixed up in something bigger.

It sounds like it should be unwatchable, but they pull it off. For one thing, it's fun. The banter between Kennex and Dorian is well written and delivered, and I especially liked the discussions on life, love and death from episode two. The "Stop scanning my testicles" was a great character moment between the two. I like their view of a future that is "normal", not a dystopian nightmare, or a utopian paradise, but a world of hope and crime in a big city. The ills of the world have not been solved, but we haven't degenerated into chaos either.

Almost Human is a fun show to switch off and woatch. It has a lot of heart for a sci-fi action show, and, as suggested by the title, it takes a bit of time to discuss the line between human and not human in a world where androids can be programed to be "too human", a "condition" that causes that line, the DRNs, to be discontinued and shelved in favour of more conventional models. I'm really looking forward to seeing more from this series, and hope we at least get a season or two out of it. I think it has glimmers of the fantastic within it's first two episodes, and has a whole lot of potential beneath it's skin. Also, someone must have written fan fiction of how Almost Human is the setup world for Battlestar Galactica![1]

Agent's of S.H.I.E.L.D., Sleepy Hollow and Almost Human are all on my weekly viewing, each providing it's own style of entertainment and surprise. If I had to pick one fo the three to recommend, I think it would be Sleepy Hollow right now, though Almost Human has the potential to usurp that given a few episodes of development. Maybe it's my levels of expectation versus my levels of enjoyment on viewing, but S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn't left me as excited as the other two shows after each episode. It's still a great show, and I'll be watching every episode, I just think the others, for now, are a little greater.

[1] - I'd love to see one of the BSG Final Five actors appear in Almost Human as one of the creators of the androids, with another appearing as the programmer for the too human DRN line! Actually... excuse me a minute. I have something to start writing...

Bow To The Future

io9, one of the sci-fi heavy news feeds on my Google Reader feed, posted a wonderful chart on the evolution of Cyborgs in cinema and TV, created by Online Schools. As an extra cool feature, they provided the HTML code to embed the chart in your own site, so I have.



I'm a big fan of the small screen Terminator series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The main friendly Terminator in that show, Cameron, was very cool. Thanks to Summer Glaus training, the killer cyborg had a wonderful weight to her movements, while still looking like a young, agile female. Such a pity it got canned before things were wrapped up. John Henry was a joy to watch as well as the once evil, now under "rehabilitation" Terminator. Even the parts that really shouldn't have worked worked really, really well, like, for example, casting the lead singer from Garbage, Shirley Manson, as the sinister head of a major computer company clearly interested in the future development of Skynet.

Other than the Terminator franchise, there are lots of other cool cyborgs on the list, from the Borg, the Cybermen and the Cylons facing off against the heroic figures of Robocop, Steve Austin and Tony Stark.

With that kind of power on both sides, I wonder who'd win in a fight between the good cyborgs and the bad? On one hand, humanity is defended by Iron Man. On the other, we also have Inspector Gadget on our side.

We're doomed.

Publicity Stunt, Or Real Deal?

This is just a bit too close to fiction to be fact, but you never know:

Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light

It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn't travel faster than light.

Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.

"We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory," said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org

The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in1994 by Michael Alcubierre. The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble.

The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.

That means that the ship would arrive at its destination faster than a beam of light traveling the same distance, but without violating Einstein's relativity, which says that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light, since the ship itself isn't actually moving.

Read more at the Discovery Channel new site:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/07/28/warp-speed-engine.html