Saturday, January 5, 2008
God Save the King
Finished reading: AD11
Well, I finally managed to get "Reclamation" out to the boards. And to Scissors MacGillicutty, wherever he happens to be riding the night, who drew the work of fan art to accompany it? It's always great to receive fan art for a work, even if that work is "Girls' Night Out". Thank the artist for me.
I now only have one more work of fan fiction to finish, the work "Same Drum, New Tune". (Switch the nouns, and it describes all of fan fiction.) This work won't need any beta-readers. I feel that I need to remain within the bounds of how I started the stories. "Reclamation" started with beta-readers and ended with beta-readers, "Same Drum" started with me pulling it out of my holly, jolly butt and it will end in the same manner.
As for myself, nothing going on here. Tomorrow, I participate in a role-playing session, one that involves dice and paper and not large amounts of kink. I will become "The Colonel", a jolly Foghorn-Leghornesque Son of the South complete with string tie and dueling pistols. Why at my house? Because it keeps me from having to travel anywhere.
(* * *)
We finally make it to "Apocalyptic Daria 11" and the story is one-quarter on the way to being done.
Linda gives Daria and Jane more information about the Nuclear Holocaust (it should be given a name, like "The Uh-Oh", in honor of presidential canddiate Ralph Wiggum). "The Uh-Oh" took out several mid-sized American cities as well as New York and Washington.
Linda talks about her current life. She's decided to make the best of things she can, moving in with a man ten years her junior. She states that if Tom Griffin is found alive, she will return to him and her current boyfriend understands that. "I don't know him well enough to love him," she says, but "I can grow to love him." (That, and Linda is terrified of being killed or raped if she ventures outside of Frostburg.)
Jane gets her wound looked after by a doctor, and Daria is looked after by a man who manages to ignore the firearm she's carrying. Daria and Sam discuss the pernicious half-live of radioactive elements -- cities directly hit will not be habitable for thousands of years. Daria has an advantage -- it appears that Highland was near a uranium source, and she has studied up on the pernicious effects of radioactivity (Beavis and Butt-head undoubtedly provided ample reason to study).
As Daria and Jane prepare to journey further, they have a tender moment with Linda. She's grown to care about them, and wishes them well.
(* * *)
A few comments: Linda's acclimation to her present circumstances was interesting. Some people are simply natural adapters. With American society on the ropes and her family possibly dead, Linda has reluctantly moved on. What kind of life she'll have in Frostburg is uncertain, but it will be a life. Across the country, thousands of people trapped in unfamiliar places with no way to get back home are making similar decisions.
Daria's knowledge of radiation -- and how to survive it -- finally comes from a plausible source. Her line about "uranium in the drinking water" to explain Highland (and its prized mutant dumbass) has given her some basic information about half-lives and isotopes. Undoubtedly, she has read a few things from civil Defense about "What to do after 'The Uh-Oh'" and she has learned her lessons well. (I wonder if the author gave a back-explanation after some complaints.)
A sidebar. There was a book called "Warday" -- here is the Wikipedia link . I don't have a copy of the book that I read twenty years ago, but the authors left some powerful impressions.
The first being that the economy would be virtually wrecked. The authors contention when the book was written in 1984 that it would only take two nuclear bombs to destroy the United States -- one dropped on New York and the other on Washington. Washington would take out the government and New York would take out the financial command center of the American economy, and the electromagnetic pulses would wreak havoc on computers. Of course, America might be more resilient in 2007 than it was in 1984; I have no such optimism.
The second impression was that the United States would instantly stop being the most powerful country in the world. Other first world powers that were not hit would step into the vacuum. I remember reading a passage regarding "British Relief", a relief organization that helps the United States by providing food, supplies -- and military assistance from an untouched Britain. (In some communities, the British Army keeps scavengers and do-badders away.) There is a scene where the Duke of York -- Prince Andrew -- comes to visit an American city after "The Uh-Oh". He gets a cheering reception, with the streets lined with British flags -- the impression that the local people have pretty much given up on the US government and if they had the chance, they'd raise a pint and pledge allegiance to Old Blighty in a fortnight.
Who knows? Maybe Daria and Jane will run into the British constabulary on their way? Or, failing that, the Chinese People's Army. I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords.
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2 comments:
Frankly, I don't think I would be as optimistic as the authors of that book. Crippling the U.S. economy would cripple the world economy; there wouldn't be any such thing as "unaffected nations". We're all too intertwined for anything less.
If by fan art you mean the four images at the beginning of post, I did them. They're taken from a scene in the movie Rules of the Game, with Tiffany waking up in the last one cut from "Of Human Bonding." I darkened the image of Tiffany a bit, but not enough to suggest that she's waking up at night.
If we're thinking of the same book, it goes on to note that the California was uneffected (unaffected? I can never figure those out sometimes) by the two nukes, and still has a booming economy. But—Holy Grapes of Wrath, Batman!—California doesn't want refugees from the rest of the nation. In fact, the Californian border is large, forbidding fence.
Regarding 9/11 and the economy, I don't think the true impact (the hell with distinguishing between effect and affect) may ever be known. The bank-that-shall-not-be-named had working computer applications in their offices at Seven WTC, and if they were as careless about backup systems as the application our group maintained...
Also, the Bank of New York, not a big retail name, but important in back office services to other banks and brokerages, especially depository services, the business of holding securities for other parties, got caught with their pants down. Federal regulations say that you have to have backup systems for significant financial systems, and that they must be on different parts of the power grid from the systems they back up. BoNY had their main systems in a facility just one or two blocks north of the WTC complex. Some systems were backed up at a facility in New Jersey, some in their offices at One Wall Street, which, despite geographical proximity, was still on a sufficiently different "part" of the power grid to satisfy the regulators.
Months later, I was still hearing rumors about how the BoNY systems backed up at One Wall would never be reconstructed, and how, depending on how big a customer you were, either BoNY had totally fucked you, or you could totally fuck BoNY.
As for my group at the bank-that-shall-not-be-named, we were engaged in a surreal exercise: our main systems were in New Jersey, but their backups were at—7 WTC! But because regulations required all important systems have backups, we were in a mad scramble to construct something that could be passed off as a replacement backup system in another Manhattan location.
You can't make this stuff up. On the other hand, it's all so abstruse, probably nobody outside of those who already understand it appreciate the ironies.
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