Kiya and I are working on a segment involving the General and Kiya’s former character X, enroute to Pen’s. It raises the interesting question of where–or rather when–Kiya’s former characters X and Y come from.
It’s a largish can of worms to open, if we assert that they come from the future, but boy, it sure feels like they do. I don’t know if Drin is prepared to mess about with time. Or if any of his research trended in that direction.
This is basically a question for Naga: I keep seeing Big Ag interests; they employed Turner, they’ve got hold of some nifty research by outbidding the military to employ these clever little defense subcontractors and harvesting Big Brains out of university think tanks. Is this working for you? Speculative Future time: where could this go? How could it pan out in geopolitical terms? Do we care to go there? Is this the kind of antagonist you envisioned in Turner and his friends?
IfKiya’s former character X and Y are from–you know the joke–about 12 seconds into the future, they may know some things about what Dance and Co. are up against, things they may not even realize they know, because these could be basic, taken-for-granted parts of the future landscape. In particular about the Big Ag interests that seem to be behind the modifications, and behind Turner.
What does Big Ag want? (Please note the explicitly Lacanian/Freudian conformation of the question. I’ll throw in a side order of Zizek: Who or what here is enjoying itself at our expense? Does Big Ag want to build itself a Big Playground with a lackey regime?)
I think we need some brainstorming on the motivation of our Antagonists.
They may not all be the same.
Is Turner trying to hit that last big score and get out with lots of money to keep himself comfortable, or does he want to make an impression so big that his name comes out of the shadows finally and he’s famous, or does he just want to end the pain he’s in and commit suicide by cop? Or yes, all of the above?
There’s the folks under or around Turner, also, and some of those may be the ones sending creepy messages to Salley, for their own reasons.
Or maybe *some* of the bugs are still people enough, still independent enough, that sometimes they manage to defy their mods and controllers now and then, and send out coded messages of warning about what they don’t like.
If you postulate that Uncle Arved has become more or less a captive of his own creations, then you have to wonder what their motivations are. People make references (I keep mispelling it as reverences, which is getting more Freudian than I like to contemplate) to the Hive, and to th smell of stale honey/machine oil. This suggests that the bugs have some sort of central organizing structure (which in fortress terms can be destroyed) but mostly run about on their own with general operating system commands, antlike. The general idea would be to cover the Earth and take dominion. Bleargh, that’s boring when the religious nutjobs talk about it.
The folks at Big Ag (or Ags) created the bugs, as far as we know, and the Kiplings, and tolerated the black market versions. All of those projects are expensive and risky, no guaranteed return on investment. So long as DARPA-type military Big Sekrit groups were shelling out for it, just keep writing up more specs and signing more contracts, keep them happy, it’s all good. If the black market is willing to pay for it afterward (I bet Shere Khans are worth something) we’re still good.
And possibly the bugs are for a new war, a new different combat, or just the effort to make it appear so: a fad, not a genuine change. It just looks different from the military fashion that Drin and the General and Emma were used to.
But what happens when the field exercises show that the bugs start failing with fungal diseases after 36 hours in the field?