for
3/10/2001
You know, the original idea came to me while reading the book of Genesis for class. This vengeful, petty, competitive god who could be negotiated with, duped and bribed struck me as an interesting character. I started to think about his origins story; what if there was a real entity among the early nomadic tribesmen of the Cradle of Civilization, and we were to take these stories literally? How might this being have come about, and what happened to him?
There was a short story in a collection (I'm sorry; it's been a while since I read it.) in which two robots were in a war, wounded, and running out of energy. They were confronted with a human consciousness, which had transformed itself into a magnetic variation in the Earth's ionisphere. It gave them each a sort of choice, between a jolt of electricity to get them out of the situation alive, (though they'd remain mortal) or the secret of becoming a nearly immortal magnetic pattern like himself. It then became, in short order, the average anti-immortality tale--one robot took either choice.
Also notable to me, Eater, by Gregory Benford....
Earth in the near future is confronted with a black hole that has an intelligence imprinted into its magnetic field. It arrives. It makes demands. Things happen. It's actually quite a good book, by virtue of how close to the hip Benford plays it; everything that happens happens on a human scale, and there's good science behind even the Eater's most tremendous acts. Both good things to keep in mind, now that I'm running into my own god story.
I kind of backed into it. Who'd have thought the treatment for a final video project could come along so soon? Where did the semester go? I had a model of a bug underway in my 3-D software, and I'd been wanting to do an animation of some type for some time, so I said I'd do a computer animation. And the story became the one I'd come up with during my Bible reading.
Briefly, to explain the woman-hating and rise to absolute power, I saw a man betrayed by his mate, then attacked and chased away by the man or men she'd left him for. During the chase, he happens upon a relic of an ancient time, newly unearthed by wind and rain. It explodes. Instead of killing him, it destroys his body, but leaves an imprint of his consciousness. He learns to be what he's become, grows in power and intelligence, and begins to meddle in the affairs of a fast-growing civilization.
How to hack this into a short story, and whether to: Don't know. Had hoped to come up with something over spring break, but now am almost through it. Had hoped to come up with a new story. Didn't. It seems I'm going to have to let it evolve.
My real concern is whether I want to devote so much time to such dark subject matter. The wordless picture show of a four-legged land anthropod being injured in a hunt, betrayed by a lover, chased away, killed and reborn could quickly turn into a quagmire, obviously. Not in terms of how to tell the story visually--that happens mostly subconsciously--but in terms of whether it's my story. The problem is that on some level it isn't me; I have my dark side, but I'm more comfortable with quirky, kind of funny stuff.
Still, it has something I like. I've come to dislike angst; angst is drama lite, the Nutri Sweet of media--no fat, no calories, no meat. This story is clearly in the domain of real drama.
So that's where this project stands for now. Blasphemy for drama's sake--not a bad trade off, at least for an athiest.
Touch the Toast