Far-farfetched

The big game wasn’t.

We were down twenty with five minutes left. The other team was running up-the-middle, clock-burning plays, and that's when Coach pulled his first-string.  Nothing exciting was going to happen, unless you’re a third-stringer seeing your first action in a month. Which was me.  Banging bodies, trying to hurt and not get hurt.  You know.  Football.  And then there was two minutes left and a punt, and I was sitting on the sideline, feeling bruised and warm and happy.  I wasn’t watching the flying ball or the lights above the field.  I was looking at tooth marks in the back of my hand, wondering if I was going to get rabies. Wishing I could turn into a werewolf.  You know. I was just daydreaming.

That’s when the lights went out.  Everywhere everywhere.  Not that we knew it then.  But the grid was down, not one phone would work, and craziest of all, the school buses and next to none of the cars would start. It was dark and cold with our team and its sorry fans sixty miles from home.  Which is a very long walk.  But one kid had an ancient Ford pickup, a pre-computer beast that wanted to run. My folks didn't like it, but I climbed in the back end.  My folks told me to be careful. They always told me to be careful. I told them this was an adventure and I'd have fun, and sure enough, there were adventures along the way.  Two flat tires, one little crash. Some beer and some siphoning of gasoline. I could tell you how much fun I had, but I’m already eating my time here.  So let’s just say that ten of us rode home together, and by the end of that long dark trip, we were the ten best friends in the world.

Out of those ten, I'm the only one alive today.

By the way.

#

I was home at dawn, and that's when the grid came back on.  Except we weren't in control of the power anymore. And our Internet was missing. And every radio and TV was playing the same message:  The United States of America had been invaded.  Invaded and conquered, said our now ex-President. "With barely one shot fired in response," he said.

Getting beat by twenty is bad.  But the US had been defeated twenty thousand to twenty.  That's what the news reports were telling us. The reporters and the government people wept on camera, claiming that our nation was occupied, that martial law was in force, and every one of these invaders looked like sharp, well-fed boys and girls spoke perfect English.

But they were North Koreans, incredible as that sounded.

Which is where the story went all far-farfetched.

#

If I was conquering somebody, I'd want to conquer them hard.

Never give your enemies any chance to breathe. That's what I say.

For the next couple days, everybody in our town tried to live half-normal lives. Saturday, Sunday.  Everybody found their way home over the weekend, including my very scared parents. Phones were working, but only for emergency calls. Televisions and computers worked fine, but after that first rush of news, there was nothing to see besides the posted rules for what made good citizens.  Punctuality. Order. Respect. That's what our new rulers appreciated. Then Sunday night, just when everybody was numb and depressed, televisions went back to normal-looking, normal-sounding programs.  Fox and CBS were gone. But if you had cable, you got sixty networks.  Sixty networks that we didn't know.  Each network had its own slate of shows.  Which was actually a big kick, after being bored for the weekend. But the big message is that every program looked as good as the best Hollywood could make by using live actors and real cameras. Yet our masters had cooked up these programs, including every face and voice and spoken word, inside their superconductive quantum computers. That’s the kind of power they had. It was like Americans walking into a Stone Age camp, showing the Neanderthals how to build fire with U-235. It was a wild, wild magic that stole away our capacity to breathe.

Monday, schools opened again.

We were told to go back to our lives.  People discovered that car engines ran and we could travel, but only travel to work and stores and back again.  We didn't know it then, but little whiskers of carbon and treachery had been added to electrical systems everywhere, keeping tabs on everyone.  Maybe the whiskers had been there for a long time. I still don't know how that trick was done, or when.  But if you tried driving anywhere wrong, your vehicle pulled to a stop and died.

People love routines, particularly when they don't have anything else. Most of my classmates showed at high school, even those that didn't usually make it on Mondays. But instead of learning, we spent our day telling rumors.  Crazy shit that had to be repeated because it was so crazy that just hearing it made things seem understandable. Like the one where invisible drones were flying over us night and day.  Or a robot army was assembling in the barley fields north of town. Or how every satellite in Earth orbit had been turned to mush and meteorites.

When Friday night came again, the sitcoms stopped. TV told our town to go down to the high school football field. It was time to meet our new bosses.

There were just two of them, as it happened.  A pair of Koreans.  The guy was forty and over six feet tall, and he was ugly. The woman was twenty-something and almost as tall, and gorgeous. The guy had a big gut, by the way.  Which led to a buddy of mine to joke, asking, “How do you get fat eating cabbage?”

We were standing high in the stands, him and me. And the Koreans were at the 50 yard line, flanked by a squad of ten-foot robots.

The Korean guy started laughing just then, with a big voice.  That voice didn't use stadium equipment, or any microphones or speakers we could see.  But he had a booming laugh that came into everybody's ear, and he repeated the joke before confessing that he liked cabbage fine, but he preferred beef, Kobe beef cultured in a pristine vat, and we should never believe anything we had heard about his great country.

I shot that guy.  Six months later, after a whole lot of trouble, I had a line-of-sight on both of them, and I picked the ugly fat man to hit with the laser. I cooked away everything below his belt. Then I was beside him and he was dying, looking up at me, saying that I had screwed up. He said that I should have killed the woman, because he was the nice one. The woman's revenge was going to be a whole lot worse than his ever would have been.

But that was in the future.

Nobody had a clue.

Up in the audience, we joked about cabbage, and he laughed with us and warned us about our ignorance, and then the laughter was done. And those two people standing in the middle of the football field started to talk with their perfect, perfect American English. With booming voices, they told their subjects about how the world really was.

#

The Korean War wasn’t what we thought it was.

Taking over one little finger of Asia was never the point of that slaughter.  And it didn't matter which superpower got the upperhand either. MacArthur?  Stalin? They were as ignorant as the Marines dying in the snow. No, all that mattered in that fight was one object buried in an ordinary hillside south of the original border.  It was after World War II when a peasant and his teenage son found this mystery object poking out of their native ground.  It was evening, and what they saw was glowing. And because glowing things can be evil, the father pulled his boy away from the mystery. But boys are wild, that boy returned later that night. That warm hard chunk of weirdness was too inviting, and he touched it. Then the weirdness merged with him in some fashion or another, and suddenly he was smarter than most people would ever be, his head filled with plans for wondrous, impossible machines.

The first thing he did, after covering up the prize, was to what home and tell his father what he had done and what he had learned. But smelling evil, that old guy tried to subdue his son, and the two fought and the younger man was left alive, and angry.

The two people standing on the fifty yard line didn't name the boy. But they repeated the story that they'd heard since childhood: Their nameless hero walked south with his news. But his own people dismissed him. And the few Westerners laughed at him. So he went north instead, where Kim Il-Sung, the new Communist leader, proved willing to listen and to believe.  And once a plan was in place, he acted on what he believed.

No war had ever been so simple. There was one goal, and that was to unearth a chunk of matter that could fill a stadium with its brilliance. And then picked people had to bring it home. The fighting lasted for three years only because that marvel proved to be bigger than most rooms, and it weighed about fifty times more than a similar-sized chunk of lead would weigh. The prize had to be moved unseen. It couldn't be seen by enemy planes or soldiers. Ever. It had to be buried when it might be discovered, or when the borders shifted again. And all through this process, only a special few people were allowed to physically touch it. One million people died, just because a fat prize had to be dragged up to where the North could be sure to keep hold of it.
 

“Is this thing alien?” somebody asked. Somebody down below me.

The Koreans expected the question, and the woman laughed.  In that way people laugh because it was such an obvious, stupid question.

“Of course it’s alien technology,” she told us.  “What else can it be?  You think dinosaurs constructed a hyperdense server field wrapped around an antimatter generator?  Huh?  Is that what you believe?”

Actually, I was thinking it could be some machine from the future. Or maybe another dimension. I had a bunch of possibilities in mind. But I didn't want to get laughed at, so I kept quiet.

Suddenly the man said, “We call the artifact the Far Mind."

Somebody on my right shouted, "Why that?"

"Because it is a wonderfully appropriate name," he said, flashing a big, perfect-toothed grin.

"What does your thing look like?" one old woman shouted out.

"That's not for you to know," said the Korean woman.

Then with a tone, the old woman asked, "Have you ever actually seen the thing?"

"Enough questions," said the man. Which meant, as far as I could see, "No, we haven't seen it, and that's a sore point, and now shut up."

Every time they talked, our two tyrants got geekier and easier to read.  In some ways that was comforting, as if they were saying, “We're not that awful or clever. God, we can't even keep any secrets.”  But also in a bad way, like, “We could tell you everything and look pathetic, and not even then could you defeat us.”

Anyway, the Far Mind was alien, or it was something else entirely. Whatever it was, the Mind was not at all complicated to use.  Men and women could lay their hands on any part of the thing, and ideas would flood inside their heads.  Peasants, premiers. It didn't matter who got the honor.  A select group was chosen from the North Korea's few scientists and its highest leadership, and within days, their civilization was way beyond ours.  The first order of business was to end the war with an Armistice. Second was to mask everything they did next, which proved easy.  Using their new talents, they wove fusion reactors out of new alloys, and with all that cheap power, they cloaked labs and towns and factories and more factories. Eventually entire cities vanished.  The Russians would come and visit their allies, and they saw nothing. The Chinese never left, and they saw very little. The darkest dark had come over one little piece of the world, and the rest of the world marched on, unaware of the truth.

Yeah, that was a crazy shit story.

But as it turns out, that gorgeous camouflaging system isn't quite as tight as those two claimed. Particularly once you figure out the basic tricks.

I never was good at school.  But that night, I was the best student there was. I listened very carefully to the stories.  I learned that any government works well, if your leaders happen to be superintelligent bureacrats. I learned that the population of North Korea was about twice as big as what we assumed it was.  Which still wasn't a lot of people. And per capita, that little country used about five times the energy that the US used.  It only looked dark from space because their system is cloaked and so efficient that not even spare photons get free. And that fact, plus the beef-eater's fat belly, taught me that my enemies might not be as lean and hard as they pretended.

The Korean capital city with its ugly parades? It was like an amusement park, all for show. And the tales about the refugees, starved and desperate? Those are clones of real people, cultivated in vats and starved underground, then infused with fake memories and compellingly pathetic tales.

I learned that North Koreans love to tell stories.

Standing before us, these two people were the faces and voices of our new masters. Together, they warned us to never think about rebellion.  Which was when they gave away the fact that they actually couldn't read thoughts. I know that I was busy wondering what it would take to kill them and their millions of fat brothers.  Then they mentioned that they had a huge area to rule, just the two of them.  It was a boast, like, "Five big counties to administer. Look how important we are." But that implied that it was just them, nobody else. Then to impress us with just how in charge they were, they had their tall robots drag three people out of the stands.  Each of their prisoners was a criminal.  They claimed. Coach happened to be one of those people. Charges were read. The criminals blubbered, telling us they were innocent.  But frankly, the town already had an idea about Coach and his "hobbies", and hearing the charges, nobody thought, “Oh, not our buddy.  Not Old Coach.”

The giant robots shot three bad people through the heart.

Then somebody up on the highest bleacher asked, “So when do we play the rest of our season?”

It was our starting running back.  A college prospect.

“Never,” said the Korean woman.  “Football is cancelled.”

If she could hear our whispers, she could certainly hear the grumbling about that news. The woman was wearing tall black boots, and just then she was wiping them clean of blood splatters. She looked more than a little squeamish to me, putting down the rag, telling us, "We don't approve of events that aren't scripted."

Three years later, the woman still wants scripts. But I can tell you, first hand, Miss Black Boots long ago got over her dislike for blood.

#

I could sing about adventures. Ambushes and battles. The ebb and flow of this long rebellion.  Really, a lot of it would have been spectacular to watch.  If you were safe. But while it was happening to me, there was nothing to see but mud and lasers and homemade bombs, plus dead people that I had called friends. And a very few enemy soldiers.  Since we fight machines and software a lot more than we ever fight real people.

To my count, I've killed nine of the hated Overlords, which makes me something of a war hero.

I did sleep with one of those Koreans, and I loved her, and I'm not talking about the girl anymore.

And also have killed fifty-odd collaborators.  By the way.

No, I was never much of a football player.  Too small, too weak. Way too slow. But as a soldier, I am supremely talented.

#

How this war ends, nobody knows.  Or even if it can ever really end.  But after three years of struggle, I finally learned the big reason why we were conquered in the first place, and why all of this has gone so wrong for the all-powerful invaders.

A few weeks back, we were in a cloaked camp in the hills. A group of resistance fighters eating cultured beef stolen from the enemy stocks.  And through the camouflage stepped this Korean-looking fellow that we recognized just in time.

He was Korean-American, I mean. And we held our fire.

His face used to be a famous face.  He used to be an actor.  Not a big, big name.  But he was that guy that always got picked for those television shows where you needed a good-looking Asian dude.

No warning, this half-celebrity came striding into camp, leading his little team of guerrillas, and after a couple ugly moments, everybody was acquainted and happy enough. It seems our actor had had his fans among the Overlords. There were people who'd seen and enjoyed his abbreviated career. And after the invasion, he used that fame to worm his way inside the lowest reaches of the new government.  That's how he learned that North Korea had never wanted to invade us. Not on this timetable, no. They had to unpack a plan in a day, and come at us in way too much of a rush.  Why?  Because they heard a rumor, an ugly credible rumor, that the American dogs had uncovered a second artifact somewhere in the Western US. It was identical to the first artifact but outside Korean control.  So they came to take it, except they hadn't found it yet. Nobody had. So today, that alien-time-machine-dimension-hoping key to universal knowledge was being chased by every player still walking the world today.

Oh, and our guest had other news to share from the outside world.

The United States proved to be a very easy meal, sure. But having made themselves visible, the North Koreans were forced to take over anyone who might fight against them. Their siblings in the South.  And China.  And Japan, which they burnt to nothing.  Then most of Russia and all of Europe too, which left the rest of the world ripe for the taking too.  So in just a few weeks, with nothing but a few centuries worth of new technology, that tiny nation became largest empire ever, as big as any civilization could ever be.  Which was too much way too fast, even for a people that had magic and marvels at their command.

Our enemies have suffered a lot of losses.

This sprawling big district has just the one gal in charge.

Miss Black Boots is killing hundreds and thousands, and for no good reason except to catch us. And to kill me.

Our semi-famous guest had come here for two reasons, he said. First, he wanted to shake my hand.  And second, he wanted to borrow a couple of my best people. Because he was off to raid an enemy stronghold, hoping to grab intelligence about where our own Far Mind might be hiding.

Neither of my people have come back again. Which is sad, or it means nothing. A lot of people vanish in war.  And this war is better at make disappearances happen.

And speaking about vanishings:

This is what I thinking about a lot.  For the last weeks, when I’m curled up in a fetal-cocoon, breathing my own recycled oxygen, I keep wondering how if there are two artifacts buried in the earth, two Far Minds, then couldn't there be three or fifty-three more of these same machines hiding in the ground somewhere?  And maybe one them got itself found by some other lucky group, way back in the past.

Why do I say that?

Because sometimes, now and again, I see something. In the corner of an eye, I'll spot somebody I don’t expect to see.

He's not Korean, and he's not like me either.

No, he's short but looks quick, strong as hell.

Like a Neanderthal.

But he's wearing a spacesuit, and riding on his thick, fullback-style chest is this weird green-and-blue picture of Mars.

The real Mars.

Not the one that we think we know.

Carnage

You are nice in the way boys and men are told to be nice.  You smile.  You have a fetching, believable smile.  Your voice is pleasant, your manner polite, your hair is always combed, and you don’t smell bad at all.

Body odor is important among people, and each day, you try to be nicest and cleanest and very best person possible. 

Decent Christian boys are expected to do good acts, and you never question anyone’s worthiness.  Not the first time, at least.  But if he or she proves unworthy of decency, then you can ration your help.  In small, polite ways, you tell them, “No.”  You say, "I really can't today," or "Good luck with that," and then you walk on. Maybe the bullies hit you.  Maybe the pretty girl in algebra talks badly about you.  It doesn't matter. You're tougher than anybody, which can be a blessing. But the greater blessing--the unlikely magnificent power of all powers--is how you are able to vanish seamlessly into this strange little world.

Boys grow, and you also grow.  You transform into a fine young man with dark hair and European skin, broad shoulders and a strong, testosterone-enriched chin.  Which is funny, because there is no testosterone inside your body.  Nor do you have blood, or at least any human blood.  Your bones, visible and invisible, mirror a human skeleton.  Except not even the tip of your little finger can be broken. Which is sharp evidence that your talent for camouflage is just as remarkable as any of your other extraordinary powers.

Your adoptive father is destined to die suddenly. That's going to be the critical moment in your upbringing.  But nearly as important is the summer vacation to Yellowstone.  You are twelve. You are standing with your parents, gazing down at a deep pool of scalding water and brightly colored stone.  When nobody is looking, you are bad.  You slip your hand into the hot spring. Being swift, you can get away with quite a lot.  In and out goes the fingers, and then you walk on, smelling the sulfurous residues under what look like fingernails.  A younger boy happens to be standing at the next hot spring. His destiny is to become your nemesis and arch rival.  But not today.  Today he is a geeky stranger who loves science and the power that comes from deep, thorough knowledge.  He lectures to the other tourists, his confident voice describing the bacteria that thrive in water hot enough to cook normal life. Extremophiles thrive in the harshest environments, and they might be the first life to have evolved on a much younger earth, and with a flair for drama, this other boy claims that there is no way to know what beasts are lurking miles beneath the cold crust and cold oceans of this little, little planet.

Then and there, you decide that you are an extremophile.  You come from the deepest regions of earth, which explains your fantastic strength as well as your heightened, ground-piercing senses.

It’s a nice story.  Utterly wrong, but soothing.

Odd as you are, you're desperate to believe that you belong to this world.

#

Except you aren't one of the earth’s children.  A spaceship brought you here.  Of course.  You eventually find the derelict ship and ghost waiting inside, a ghost.  The ghost is some kind of recording. A human face and a warm, wise human voice have been spliced into this alien file, and that human voice uses the local American tongue. A distant world is mentioned. Without details, enemies are mentioned. Then the ghost confesses that its home world has been destroyed but it managed to save one small child, and that's when the ghost claims to be your true father.

The story feels true. Your physiology is obviously suited for somewhere else, presumably a violent, swift world.  That’s why you can fly.  That’s why you have never been injured.  And camouflage must be very important in this other realm, which is why you can hide so well among the apes.  This body of yours was grown as a reflex.  Each unbreakable hair is as long or short as necessary.  You breathe and sing and laugh like anyone, although you don't fart as often as most young men. This world is full of dogs, and every dog has an extraordinary nose. Yet none of them have ever smelled anything odd about you.  Your disguise is so complete that you feel like most young males. To you, young earth women have fascinating faces, wondrous bodies.  Which is absurd.  The loneliest human male would never, ever lust after a bird or butterfly or an orange slime of extremophiles.  Yet each of those organisms is more closely related to humanity, in their genetics and in their history, than you are to any of these frail, beautiful creatures.

#

Your adopted father dies and you grow up, and then you migrate to one of the world’s great cities.  Being good and decent remains important.  So you help people.  But now you start doing your goodness in a public fashion, wearing a colorful suit and other disguising elements that leave millions of people unable to ignore you, yet also unable to attach their hero to your alter ego.

This new life proves easy enough.

Really, what can burglars and the mob do against a superquick entity that sees through walls and notices every whisper?

Crime collapses inside the city.  You are the savior, the common man's champion.  But champions need foes, and there are always new wrongs to right. Your skills are applied to a different sort of criminal, resulting in a lot of big names in the financial district sweating inside their well-tailored uniforms. But before any of them are sent to jail--before virtue can be assured in the wonderful world--an alien arrives.

#

Certain facts are inarguable: A good man's enemies will become his son's enemies.  And this alien arrives in your solar system carrying with the same impressive set of powers that you wield.  Perhaps he isn't accustomed to the earth, and maybe being older means that he's past that vigorous point in life that you seem to inhabit.  But he is a military creature and something of a politician, and he he has a fierce need to avenge old crimes.  And like you, he can make a place for himself fit among the watery, weak humans.  Except this creature is quite a bit shrewder than you, and he took the trouble of studying human society before finding the perfect form to present.

The city that you made peaceful and kind receives a sudden visitor.

The enemy arrives wearing the guise of Christ.

Belief is always painted with shades of gray. As a boy, you would sit in church listening to parables about the Son of God. There were Sundays when you believed in His divinity, and other Sundays when He was just a prophet and a man. But now He has apparently come back to His birth world again, as promised.  Jesus is back. But He doesn't appear in the Holy Land, no. He comes to your city, doing a few spectacular miracles, and afterwards he declares paradise and smiles, and smiles…

This is not the Christ.

You tell yourself, but no one else.

You know these sleight-of-hands. This creature is definitely alien, probably one of your own kind.  And soon as you feel certain, you confront your enemy.

He smiles at the fresh-faced youngster wearing that gaudy costume. And with a voice that nobody else can hear, the creature reveals two pieces of hard truth:  He was your father's nemesis, and his plan is to slaughter millions of these vile creatures, and then enslave the survivors.

Good men always fight evil.

You tell him to leave this world, and he refuses. You offer clear threats and opaque threats. He laughs them off. Then you grab him, intending to carry him into space, and too fast for any human eye, he slugs you.

You've been hit many times, and shot, and bombed, and struck by trucks and trains. But this is the first blow that ever made your head pop backwards, and react like any young human male. Within moments, a terrific battle is being waged.  The city and the world watch two aliens battering one another. The drama culminates with a supersonic crash of fists, and one the warriors seems to die.  By all appearances, you have won.  The world watches while their hero stands over the corpse.  There are no textbooks for the problem of deity disposal.  You’re try to decide what to do next. While unbeknownst to you, the world has begun to wonder if you're worthy of any praise.

Never suspecting the trap, you bury the corpse at the earth’s core.

Three days later, the crust splits, and using heat vision, a red monster rises from Hell. Then with a furious voice, he roars at the world, assuring his audience that everyone is flawed and weak, and everyone should now prepare to die.

#

The next battle has to be ugly.  Perhaps your enemy isn't as powerful as you, but on the earth he can do whatever he wants. Rules don't have any hold on him. Since you have affection for these watery little beasts, he stomps on them.  He burns people and crushes them under the skyscrapers, and none of this carnage matters.  A boy stomping on ants would show more decency, and a boy would grow bored.

Nothing about this world matters to your enemy.  To him, all that matters is you--you and your ties to a lost planet and a dead father.

Because you are good, you fight to protect the watery beasts.

But your enemy slaughters thousands more of them.

You try to defeat him with body blows and trickery.

But he has tricks of his own, and his incandescent body is just as invulnerable as yours.

The only tactic left is to find some way to kill yourself. If you die, maybe he'll give up on this slaughter. Or maybe you can kill the both of you, at the same time. Which is a somewhat better but still awful solution.

What did you learn as a boy?

No good man hesitates to do what is right.

But you do hesitate, at least for a few seconds. Dozens more die while you find the simple resolve to let this plan play out.

Again you attack, and he slams you with his unbreakable fists. You let him smash away, and between one blow and the next, you change form.  This skill used unconsciously for nearly thirty years, with endless success, is turned in a fresh direction.  The body change can be as simple as your legs becoming powerful arms.  Really, why even bother using legs when you can fly wherever you want?  And before he can react, you have him in your grasp, using all four arms, and like you have never flown before, you leap into the sun.

Stars are plasma and radiation and mass and crushing, relentless pressures.

Every organism has limits. Even you.  After all, if your species was true invincible, then they would have survived the demolition of your home world.

No, you guess that the sun can kill you and it will kill him too.  Together, you plunge past the bright surface, diving into the black meat of that nuclear firestorm. And that's when your enemy dies. He dies in your arms, turning into plasma and nothingness, and then you come home.

You come home slowly, injured as you are, weak as you are.  But the pause seems like a blessing. You have time for second guesses. You make plans for the kind of help you’ll deliver to those who survived this mass slaughter.  But let's agree that you are not the brightest soul, certainly not when it comes to the nature of your adopted species.

You have been gone, and a series of photographs have become famous in your absence.

These images were taken during that final battle.  Your enemy would grab you and throw you, usually aiming for the tall buildings. And you did the same, except you always flung his body into the soft pavement and stone. People didn't know where to hide. A group of innocents were standing together inside one skyscraper, holding hands. This was an office for the local newspaper. The staff were watching two colorful specks battering each other. And that’s when you were thrown again, launched like a cannonball, but faster, and your spinning body shattered glass before passing through the onlookers.

You were unharmed, of course.

Your first impulse was to fly back into the open air, trying again to kill what refused to die.

A young photographer with sharp instincts and an excellent camera managed to catch you before you flew off again.

Your fabulous body had tumbled through the unlucky ones, your colorful uniform left covered with gore, blood and brains as well as telltale bits of clothing.

The images were clean, sharp:  You standing inside the ruined office.  You covered with the dead. Slaughter always happens in any war.  This was war, and people would accept that.  At least they would try to. But that sequence of images shows your body dripping with guts and shredded fabric and real blood and the rest of the mess.

Standing there, you felt wet, you felt sloppy.

Boys should not be sloppy.

Like a dozen times before, you stood on the silly feet that you grew for no reason except to vanish into this world, and at a supersonic speed, you shook yourself clean.

One flinch, and the uniform was bright again.

That’s the sequence that every human has seen during the days it took you to return home.

They saw the carnage, and then they saw how easily you escaped that carnage.

You shook like a dog, and all the while your pretend face flashed what might be a smile, or might be nothing but teeth and lips obeying a very old habit.

THE SUBTLE FORCE

The universe appreciates gravity.

Humans, less so.

I wanted to love GRAVITY.  And there were moments and long minutes when the special effects and the human effects left me smitten.  There is elegance and such magnificent beauty involving Sandra Bullock in her spacesuit, doing the dreary plug-in and boot-up and hope for success work from the hardware.  This is the dullest lab work, plus a view worth billions.  And later, when Sandra is stripped of the suit, floating exhausted in zero-gee...that moment struck me as perfect.  I didn't want it to end.  But for a movie based on silence, there was a terrible amount of motion serving the modern role of roaring, senseless noise.  Some of the scientific snafus were obvious to me.  Some I learned about later.  And then there's the matter of big objects moving together in low-orbit flight.  That doesn't constitute a scientific mistake, perhaps.  No, the mistake was inserting contrivances in an effort to build some story that people will "Relate to."

(People don't need much excuse to relate to a character.  There's a great little moment in the television series COMMUNITY when the curmudgeon/lawyer Jeff shows everybody a pencil.   Then he names the pencil. Let's say he names the pencil Larry, and then he callously breaks Larry in two, and everybody at the table grieves.  And hell, I was sitting at home, feeling horrible sorry for poor Larry.)

My point is that playing with science and orbits might be necessary, sure.  But what I take from this isn't wagging my finger at mistakes, no. It's the lost chance to use what is real and building a better, more dramatic story.

To my knowledge, space debris doesn't fly past at sports car speeds.  GRAVITY depends on the colliding orbits, and it is possible to end up with relatively slow collisions.  But that is unlikely.  Sandra Bullock is moving 17,000 miles an hour, which is far faster than a bullet shot by a bullet that is shot by a bullet.  The same speeds are being achieved by every mindless shard of metal and plastic.  They plunge at her from some other piece of the sky.  Seeing their arrival is unlikely.  Maybe a flash of reflected sunlight now and again, but no tumbling object is visible.  Certainly nothing possessing shape and color.  Nothing will happen, and then the wrench in Sandra's hand will be gone from her hand.  No sound.  No sense of oncoming menace.  And that same magnificent, capricious violence will happen to an astronaut's face, and the shuttle will be pierced and pierced again, as if by a furious, invisible demon.  Space debris is a demon, amoral and relentless.  How could that be anyway but dramatic?

The ninety minute clock is contrived.  I don't think the two orbits would marry up like the gears in a perfectly aligned clock.  Directors and other souls trained in movie classes like the ticking clock, but this device isn't used that effectively in the movie, if only because nobody bothers to look at the time every few minutes, which is what I would damn well do.

A better ploy might be to embrace the demon.  The worst possible collision spreads chaos across the sky.  This is not impossible. If space is full of debris, and if collisions continue to make new terrors, then you don't know when the next assault begins, or how long it will last, or if any pause is a genuine peace or just the demon having fun with with your terror.

Space is the ultimate suburbia.  Space stations and telescopes aren't stacked up in the sky like they are in GRAVITY.  There are many fine reasons for this, including differing launch requirements and the lack of good reasons to travel in flocks.  But there might be worthy reasons someday, which is why I vote for a modestly futuristic story.  Of course movie people like the feeling of "modern" tales.  They think that audiences relate to the present day more easily.  Which is why we see an extinct space shuttle--good old 1970s technology bringing back reliable emotions.

I recently wrote a screenplay based on one of my works.  Like the source material, the script has to have an impossible, futuristic machine ripping holes in our universe.  And for good story reasons, I thought the machine should speak with a woman's voice.  But I was told that no, the director wanted to keep the story rooted in the present.  So I asked, "What kind of phone do you use?"  An I-phone, he said.  Which implies that he talks to Siri more often than almost anyone else in his life.  And that brings up one fine rule of movie making:  Setting your movie in the present day really means a mixture of times, and when it comes to attitudes, the story will often reflect bygone eras.

In a rewrite, I would be sorely tempted to set the movie in some sprawling city in space--factories and whatnot scattered across a few hundred miles--and the whole ugly catastrophe would start with some small blunder.

What catastrophe doesn't start small?

And gravity is mysterious.

This has nothing to do with the movie, not directly.  But I think it bears repeating, and I mean every day and maybe every waking hour.  Humans don't have a clue what gravity really is.  Yes, it seems to be everywhere, but as one of the four known forces, it is miserably weak.  The bulk of its energy might be slipping into other dimensions, which is spooky fun.  It doesn't play with the other natural laws in neat ways, which the other three do.   And just because our world and our bodies hug each other, nobody can say for certain that gravity works across eternity and over tiny gaps.

But here's another measure of our ignorance.  No computer, real or imagined, has sufficient power to perfectly model every gravity-mediated motion in a universe.  And even calculating the orbits of just three bodies involves a lot of approximations and subtle sleight-of-hands.

Which is movie making, by all means.  Approximations and sleight-of-hands.

By the way, I loved the last scene of GRAVITY, too.

Iron Man Last

I don't rewrite the books that I read.  Not even novels.  I might like this part of the story, or that character is too stock or too dull.  This twist works, and all of that is drivel, and sometimes the author is too brilliant/obscure for me.  (Which says something, since Faulkner and Tolstoy are among my favorites.)  But to sit down and contemplate where the story left the rails, and how I would fix the wreck...well, I don't do that very often or with much heart.

Movies are another business.

Reading means that I can stage the events inside my head, serving as the director working with good material and bad.  How can you hate what you spent twenty hours reading?

Movies are brief and bright, entering the brain fully formed.

My daughter and I just finished rewatching THE AVENGERS.  We own the blue-ray, but I saw that Loki and the gang were appearing on Netflix, which is so much easier than dealing with a scratchable disk and losing your place over the next three days.  I enjoyed the movie in the theater, in 3D, and it hasn't aged too badly.  There's a formula to follow.  The 15,000 names at the end of the movie worked hard and spent tons of other people's money, and they got a lot out of the formula, nobody distracted by anything new.  Why a super-advanced species of warriors would allow themselves to be taken out by nuke...well, that's one of Hollywood's favorite cliches.  But still, I like the banter, and the Banner.

My daughter likes Ironman.

My daughter is eleven.  Maybe it's Tony's drinking and womanizing that appeals to her.  More likely, it's the charming Bob playing the title role.  And the action too.  Since she was two, my girl has shown a considerable fondness for fists and measured gore.

She and I went to Ironman 3 in the theater.

And this is one of those movies that begs the audience for a rewrite.

Ben Kingsley.  Fine actor.  And he inhabits a half-interesting character.  The twerpy drunk actor playing a role.  The real bad guy is younger and more handsome, and far more boring, and that's why he hires a face and voice to make the world pay attention.

At least that's the way it looked to me.

There isn't a lot of drama here.  The millions of dollars make noise, but the formula is applied inefficiently, the products far from clinical grade.

So let's say the studio realizes the problem and comes to me.  (Not the most likely story twist, I will admit.)  They come to me and say, "Give us your best shot, Bob."

Here it is:

Start the movie with what looks like the final fight sequence.  And by that, I mean the handsome, boring bad guy and his minions are waging war against Ironman and the newly empowered Pepper.  No deep explanations or back story is necessary.  Audiences can piece together their own logic from the clues.  Really, everything on the screen is totally familiar.  Start with a war.

One big change is that in my script, no set of contingencies allows a platoon of computer-run Ironmen.  Villains have minions, which is fine.  But Tony can't just crack open his toy box and fling out more plastic soldiers than his opponent.  That's diluting the formula.  That defeats the whole idea of a hero standing tall.  Of course a true arms manufacturer would go into mass production about two minutes after the first successful test flight.  But if we're concerned about that bit of logical weirdness, then we aren't lasting long at the important meetings with Hollywood suits.

Anyway, in my script the big battle ends with one dead bad guy and Pepper endowed with superpowers.

My point is:  Stark and Pepper are a great couple, and they deserve a movie full of witty banter and tensions and such.  And they definitely deserve more of a story than some noise stapled to end of the story about Tony curing his woman's hot flashes.

So, go back to the first, best incarnation of the three movies.  It's easy to complain that no man, genius or not, could cobble together a workable Ironman suit in a cave.  But assume that it is possible.  That implies that the suit can't be that hard to build to a ten percent measure.  By that, I mean that a man with vision could use scrap titanium and one-day output of Foxconn to build a division of armored flying soldiers.  Ben Kingsley has been hired to work the movie.  Use him as the leader.  Put him in some fictional form of Pakistan.  And then put on a real war where the flying soldiers are to us what the hoplites were to the Persians:  Well-trained troops who alone would be cut down, but in formation would be unbeatable.

The hoplites grab the Pakistani nukes.

Cities burn.

And then force Tony Stark to come up with some compelling heroic fix.  In other words, stopping the nukes where the alien opponents in THE AVENGERS couldn't.

And Pepper becomes an effective superhero in her own right.  

My daughter would approve of that, I'm sure.