synthozoic

((This is a solo story for a character I developed a few years ago in this game. The character can be found in the "Chateau Rouge" thread as well. It's an overly ambitious attempt at nonlinear storytelling that might end quite badly. Here's hoping it doesn't. One to part one.))

The Metachronicles of Quark Zombie, Part One

You, the audience, come into this story somewhere in the middle. Beginnings and ends are contextual and arbitrary things so, I won't say this story begins here. Nor will I say that everything ends happily or in tragedy because nothing really ends.

So which middle to start with since I'm forced to by the dictates of conventional narrative? Shall I start with the middle where Amanda Wilkerson died and was then used? Shall I begin with the middle where Quark Zombie was destroyed? Shall I start with the middle where I enter the story? That's were I bring you in so, if you insist, you could say that the story begins here but that's not really accurate. It only seems that way because of the limited way we humans view time and space.

You think this is all matters. Yet each struggle you make, each loss you suffer through, each victory you win only matters to you and the few around you. On the greatest scale it doesn't matter. You never die and your birth was never unique. There are an infinitude of exact copies of you scattered over enormous stretches of time and space. God, if there really is one, is a remote and grand thing indeed. Perhaps she had a hand in our creation but it would be very presumptive of us to think that we figured large in her plans.

The Quark Zombie knows this and so came a time I came to know it. Some might say this knowledge has made me insane but I've worked out the math and I find it to be rock solid. I've seen copies of myself. I've even seen exact copies of copies of myself, with exact copies of Quark Zombie, watching other exact copies of ourselves, watching the infinite regress. It was as if I was a little boy again but the fear wouldn't go away. This time I knew it was actually infinite, not merely potentially so.

When I was a little boy, I was deeply frightened by parallel mirrors. Not so much that I'd burst into tears but enough that I couldn't remain in their presence long. They just seemed unnerving to me. At the time, I didn't have the sophistication to put these fears into words but, looking back, I think my fear was based on the sight of something that was potentially infinite. Later on I realized that the tunnel of duplicates that parallel mirrors made was not actually infinite. It was kept from that by the speed of light and the lack of perfection in the mirrors and their alignment. But because that potential was there, I was frightened. These mirrors showed me, as a boy, perhaps in the same way that stars at night did, that the universe was a lot bigger and stranger than I expected.

I think my childhood fear of parallel mirrors was what drove me to become a mathematician as adult. Once I saw an example of it, I wanted to understand infinity. It was because of my mathematical training and my drive to understand infinity that I was hired by the Defense Department to work on the Portal Project.

That was what the Federal Government called Dr. Brian Webb's research back in the 1980s. The public thinks that Webb's Portal Corporation was entirely a privately formed and funded business venture but, nothing could be further from the truth. It had been known for many years that some superhumans could contact and even travel to regions outside the realm of space-time we call the universe. Not surprisingly, this fact had enormous national security implications and research projects were funded to discover the physics that underlay these phenomena with some hope of attempting to control it. It was Dr. Brian Webb, during his membership on the Freedom Phalanx, that made crucial breakthroughs in understanding how these portals to other universes worked. His story is better related elsewhere but suffice it to say that his teleporter patents weren't the only thing that funded the creation of the first portal generator. Once it became an engineering problem, the DoD poured in billions of dollars.

I joined the project in 1988, while still finishing my doctoral thesis* when the first portal generator was completed. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Flynn was my boss. To the public he was labeled in the corporate org-chart as an outside military consultant but, in reality, he was the chief Pentagon liaison officer for Dr. Webb's research group. Mostly I was there to build the mathematics that informed the computer models that controlled the portal generator. The work they gave me was rather simple--Dr. Webb had already done all the hard work years earlier--and I had a great deal of taxpayer funded time to pursue other interests, such as searching for perfect Euler bricks.

But even though the intercosmic travel was now technically simple, there was an explosion in data for physics, mathematics, history and all the social sciences. It was possible to contact and explore alternate versions of Earth where history happened differently. For example, exploration of allohistories, allowed us to make economics a more rigorous, comparative and observational science. There were versions of the United States, for example, that followed different economic policy than the United States of Prime Earth. As such they kept me and a group of physicists and mathematicians on staff to work out some of the endless details. By the middle of 1990s, when I returned to academia, I had two humble contributions to science. I had coined the phrase "cosmonymics" to refer to naming schemes of alternate universes. I also managed, in a bit of mathematical anthropology, to work out some of the interesting arithmetic systems brought back some of the more alien parallel Earths. It was this latter work that put me on the short list for either the Fields Medal or the Able Prize.

And that was where things stood in my life for more than a decade. It wasn't until the freak emergence of the Quark Zombie that my life became interesting again.

===

* Which was on novel forms of tensor analysis for the boundary conditions of topological defects--if you're actually interested that is.

Tsk, all this metal posturing--what? Ain't synth/industrial good enough fer yer little scrappers? I'm completely stunned that with all the metal stuff in this thread that no one has thought to mention the truly timeless:

Yu Gung by Einstürzende Neubauten. (No, I don't speak a lick of German but he seems very vehement doesn't he?) Futter mein ego! I am the whole Chinese people!

Awesome scrapper music. Just awesome.

I really haven't found a pattern to this yet. I usually start out with a pretty clear idea how I'm going to build a character before I start. This gets tweaked a bit as I play around with the power combos and costume editor but, by the time I get to the registration page, I actually have some semblance of a back story--except for the silly characters.

But after I drop them in the game, some concepts that were intially cool begin to fade on me and I leave those characters idle. But a few of my character conceptions just win me from the start and don't let go. If I didn't have alt-itis, I'd spend all my time just leveling the ones I really like. But my weird sense of obligation requires me to split my efforts all of them. Such is alt-itis.

For one character, Trench Terror, it's all about the costume--this robot is just too cool looking for me to ignore for long. For two others, Quark Zombie or Robot Lenin, it's all about the back story. The origin story is just too rich to leave alone. I wanna brag about my cleverness to anyone who bothers to read my toon's bio.

But basically I can't spot any pattern.

I have a string of 5 war-robots all built in the same automated factory. Does that count? Probably not I guess.

Actually it hasn't occurred to me yet to have any of my more human toons to somehow know each other.

Or I guess just ignore him. Is there a limit to the number of contacts a character can have and does the AE Contact count toward that limit?

So I've read that Virtue is the unofficial RP server but I know it happens on other servers as well. Most of my characters are on Infinity and I know there is a dedicated chat channel for roleplaying on Infinity. I've joined it even.

But to be honest, I only do I kind of half-hearted RP with in-game chat. I say that a long time table top roleplaying gamer and as someone who has written many character moves in two threads in this section of the boards. The reason for me, and this is really odd coming from a long time Internet user, is that chat between multiple people has always been very confusing to me. Chat kinda sucks actually. I mean I use it because I have to but when using the keyboard to lay down justice on the bad guys in the game I just can't chat much, nor can I keep up with others that are RP'ing as our team fights something.

So despite having detailed background stories for most of my characters, I really do the roleplaying of those characters out here on these boards as written moves.

Didn't really mean to sidetrack things--just these thoughts sprung up, ya know?

I'm sure someone has asked this before but, what is the quick, correct way to bypass or deactivate the AE contact that every new starting character is doomed to have.

The reason I ask this is the AE mission this contact gives tells me something I already know and, unlike the invention system contact, doesn't really give me any benefit in terms of experience points, enhancements or badges. It's just there to be a tutorial.

If I've already seen the tutorial frequently enough to know how the AE system works and the mission doesn't really benefit the character, is there a quick way to just bypass and deactivate that contact so I don't have to scroll past him anymore?

Inquiring minds wanna know.

No snow in Seattle either--just lots of rain as usual. It was especially cold a few weeks ago though. Rain is a good I think. It moderates the temperature. Cools things down, warms things up.