Writing

Get me Michael Bay.

If you’ve played the games, I probably don’t need to say anything else to sell you on this one. It’s fucking X-Com, people; the game where we, as a united planet, saw UFOs abducting our cattle for depraved sexual reasons and said “no more!”

Okay, yeah, I know, this is basically the plot of every sci-fi movie ever: a fleet of aliens circles the earth and invades, scooping out our brains and probing our anuses, and the only thing that will save us is a group of muscular, gun-toting badasses led by (insert action star here).

I never promised this was going to be deep. Simple is good. Simple is accessible. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with going with a winning formula, and when it comes to summer blockbusters, nothing beats a good old-fashioned alien invasion. The gleefully-vapid, balls-to-the-wall action flicks of the 80s are something of a relic, but you don’t have to look any farther than the Crank series to see that movies come in a lot of different flavors, and sometimes you crave a Red Bull. I just want to stay on-message with this movie, not overcomplicate it with unwelcome comic relief and action movie cliches. Whenever you see an alien attack movie anymore, they try to emulate Aliens by playing up the suspense and horror more than the action. They play out more like a slasher flick than an action movie, lots of cheap scares and orchestra stings.

Sure, the X-Com game is actually very slow-paced, with a lot of stalking around in dark corridors with aliens lurking in the shadows, just waiting to leap out and attack. There’s room for that in the movie, but only in the early stages when the marines don’t really know what they’re up against. Just think of a Chrysalid terror attack where X-Com encounters a town full of mind controlled and infected zombified civilians. But once the invasion is in full-swing, I want this movie to be exciting. These aliens aren’t hiding, this is an invasion!

I want the focus of this movie to be on small-squad tactics. My vision is Black Hawk Down, but with aliens: a series of loud, intense, chaotic running battles, but at its core is a group of trained killers who know what they’re doing, and they don’t rattle. I’m annoyed at how panicky and ineffective Earth’s armed forces are against giant monsters and alien threats. X-Com gave us a real feeling of empowerment, of overcoming the odds and adapting to the aliens’ gameplan. They have better weapons? That’s okay, we’ll pry them out of their cold, dead hands and use them ourselves. That’s what I want here: a real sense of teamwork. No stupid alien weaknesses like “water” (Signs) or the giant blue fuck-me light on the alien mothership (Independence Day), just salt-of-the-earth jarheads doing what they do better than anyone else, and then striking a match on the charred husks of their enemies for a celebratory cigar.

There’s nothing not to like! Aliens, marines, cool outfits, big guns, explosions, airplanes, spaceships, powered armor for the otaku, psychic powers and exploding heads, and it’s even got a feel-good message of global unity.

And this needn’t be the brainless summer entertainment you normally expect out of movies like this. I know I’ve been describing a faceless mob of disposable marines as our main protagonists, but there’s a lot of room for characters and subplots. Your main action focus will be on the X-Com operatives on the ground, of course, but you’ve also got your squadron of hotshot Interceptor pilots engaging in aerial battles. The main protagonist could be a civilian caught up in a terror attack who discovers psychic powers vital in fending off the Sectoid menace. And then there’s the grizzled commander of the X-Com forces who has to deal with all the uncooperative politicians and diplomats responsible for funding the operation. There’s definitely at least one alien agent among them, just waiting for the opportunity to transmit the location of X-Com’s hidden base to a strike fleet. How about deranged alien sympathizers actively interfering with X-Com operations? Turncoat nations seeking to strike an alliance with their new alien overlords? Corrupt megacorporations seeking to capture and exploit these new technologies! You could go anywhere with this.

And the toys! My god, man, the toys you could sell! Talk about a built-in action figure and vehicle line. Video game re-releases! TV options! I’ll be rich!

All I know is that I want a scene where a marine in powered armor fires a blaster bomb at a target hiding inside a doorway a mile away, programming waypoints so that it navigates around the door, takes a sharp u-turn and flies directly up the alien’s ass, even though the explosion would have been sufficient to kill it twice over if he’d gotten it anywhere within a hundred yards of the poor sap.

You’d have to wipe my jizz off the screen with a squeegee, man.

And I haven’t even mentioned the built-in “Terror From the Deep” sequel.

Lobstermen, guys. Lobstermen.

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You should DEFINITELY not let me write cartoons…

Many years ago, teenager Kevin Keene was pulled through his television, summoned through the Ultimate Warp Zone to Videoland, a bizarre fantasy land populated by Nintendo characters. He became Captain N, Videoland’s only hope against the nefarious Mother Brain and her villainous allies like the Eggplant Wizard, Dr. Wily, and Count Dracula. Armed with his potent Zapper weapon, he struggled for many years but was finally able to defeat the Brain and break her reign of terror. The other villains scattered, and the heroic alliance similarly dissolved. Simon Belmont returned to Castlevania to keep the Count in check, Mega Man to watch Dr. Wily, and Pit escorted the Eggplant Wizard back to his local jurisdiction.

Kevin returned home after this prolonged absence full of nonsense stories. He could never adequately explain where he’d been or what he was doing, and why he carried around useless Nintendo accessories as if they were lethal weapons. After months of pleading, his parents finally convinced him to see a doctor, but therapy sessions went nowhere. They didn’t believe he was delusional, just that Kevin had gotten hardcore into drugs and had run away from home, inventing some bizarre fiction so that people would think him crazy, thereby absolving himself of responsibility for his actions.

Everyone just figured Kevin needed time to come to terms with it. Years passed, and Kevin was never summoned back to Videoland. Games moved on, memories faded, and Kevin began to doubt his own experiences. He began to think that Videoland needed belief and imagination to continue to exist, like some kind of collective unconscious or dreamland, and with gaming moving on to bigger and better things, maybe Videoland was dead. Maybe it wasn’t real after all. Rather, it was real at the time, but only as real as a child’s belief in Santa Claus. It’s a kind of magic, a world of innocence that fades with maturity and memory.

He’s partially right.

Fiction is an infinite universe of thought, the manifestation of imagination. You think, therefore it is. Belief can strengthen these figments of imagination and give ideas power– anyone who reads Sutter Cane knows that– so it’s true that Videoland would inevitably gutter out to a dim glow, a faint, splintered reality without Kevin’s influence to unite the various stories. It’s sad, and more than a little weird to think about (sort of like Hypertime), and the theory’s got more holes in it than a pasta strainer, but sometimes the gods have a quirky sense of humor.

But Mother Brain doesn’t. Kevin Keene made one vital mistake, the monkey motherfucker: he let her live. Stewing in her defeat, she began to realize that she’d been wasting her time trying to conquer some imaginary world where plumbers could shoot fire out of flowers. Kevin came from the Real World; her own world only existed as a fleeting, passing thought of the Real. And seriously, fuck that noise. Captain N ain’t shit without his Zapper, and she’s damn skippy that whatever’s going on in the Real World, they can’t handle a full-scale Metroid invasion.

So she pulls the old crew together. Dr. Wily to figure out the math and open the Ultimate Warp Zone in the other direction. Eggplant Wizard to administrate the underlings. King Hippo for dumb muscle. But actually, it was Count Dracula who had this whole thing figured out a while ago. Ol’ Drac has got an entire gallery of paintings that form portals to other worlds. The Real World is a snap. After all, he’s kind of everywhere, and belief in vampires is stronger than ever.

Oh yeah, the Metroids are coming, and you have Edward Cullen to thank.

Luckily, the old heroes are hot on their trail, but does Captain N still have the same magic? What’s with the blue hedgehog and the pink puffball? It it Doctor Light or Doctor Wright? Is Solid Snake unlockable?

This is getting weird…

Historical Note: There are a few episodes where Captain N encounters Bayou Billy, from the only game that he couldn’t beat. Yes, The Adventures of Bayou Billy was so balls-hard that even the Game Master himself couldn’t beat it.

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I’m a big fan of MightyGodKing’s blog, and because I love, I must copy and pervert it. He likes to do a little segment on his site where he provides examples why he should be entrusted with writing popular comics series like Legion of Super Heroes, or more recently, Doctor Strange. It’s actually quite clever, and you can tell the guy’s got a lot of great ideas floating around in that skull of his.

I, on the other hand, do not. I’m still mired in the late 80s and early 90s, the salad days of my childhood, and if I’m being honest, I probably haven’t had an original thought since Twin Peaks went off the air. I think in song lyrics and movie quotes, and I’m prone to howling random quotes from Dune at innocent, bewildered people at little provocation. I wrote a freaking Highlander fanfic in a prolonged, fevered literary fugue, and I think we all know that the last time I tried writing a screenplay, the results were…shall we say, Clerky. Only nowhere near as good.

So, while MGK puts forward reasons why he should be allowed to write professionally, I’m going to tell you why I shouldn’t be permitted anywhere near the Writer’s Guild of America. I am a hackish, cartoony parasite, and the only real difference between me and the guy who writes Doom 3 fanfic is that I know what a Shift-key is for.

And I hated Doom 3.

Anyway, enough stalling! Let the shame begin!

Sliding has always had its share of gremlins. Their first slide landed them on a frozen wasteland torn apart by icy maelstroms, and they had to activate the timer early to escape a tornado. As a result, the timer’s electronics were fried and they were unable to select their own destination. Sliding from there became a hopeless guessing game akin to spinning a roulette wheel with infinite slots and hoping to land on one exact point. Worse, Quinn and the Professor were never able to correctly suss out how much power to allocate to the portals for a safe journey, forcing them to take their best guess. And on top of all that, the remote has seen a ton of abuse, and oftentimes one of the brainiac characters has to spend the B-plot of each episode trying to jury-rig up replacement electronic parts to get it working again.

In short, the timer was a piece of shit, cobbled together with what the group could afford from a dozen Radio Shacks scattered across wildly different corners of the multiverse. Of course it doesn’t work properly, and they’ve never been able to fix it because Quinn left all his schematics back on his PC. They’re actually pretty lucky it worked as well as it did until they managed to swipe a better one from the Kromaggs.

Until then, they had to deal with some dreadful mishap cropping up on every slide. The timer and interdimensional portals were easy to disrupt with electrical surges and inclement weather, and when that happened, the slide became even more unpredictable than before: Quinn might spend the entire slide invisible and incorporeal, the individual group members might be scattered in radically different locations, or maybe even lost between dimensions forever. Quinn found himself amalgamated with a parallel version of himself known only as Mallory (a condition that was never reversed).

That should have been their clue right there: the effects had been steadily getting worse, even after they’d managed to get a better timer. The old timer sucked, sure, and was outright dangerous to use, but it had nothing to do with the timer.

It’s because sliding itself is tearing the multiverse apart.

You can’t just go ripping holes in the fabric of the space-time continuum and jumping through them. Quinn Mallory may have seemed a brilliant young man with a savant’s grasp of theoretical quantum physics, but in reality, he wasn’t all that bright. In fact, he was lucky to have solved the equations to open the portals at all. He never would have figured it out without a timely visit from a much more intelligent Quinn-double from another dimension to fill in the gaps. He lacked a fundamental understanding of certain other laws of physics, like the laws of conservation of matter and energy, and the fact that all of these physical laws and universal constants only work if the universe itself stays constant. And it doesn’t.

That’s part of the reason why Wheeler and Fuller demonstrated why sliding, a.k.a. the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, doesn’t work. Their paper showed that any attempt to open a wormhole between parallel dimensions should close instantaneously the moment it was formed, before even light could escape. Even something with the mass of a photon bleeding through between dimensions causes an imbalance, a shift in the constants of mass and gravity of the universe. This shift will always cause sweeping, pervasive changes in every single physical object in the universe. It affects the accelaration of gravity. It changes the orbital distance of electrons around their nucleus. It changes the speed of light. It changes the flow of time and its dilation over distance.

In fact, Einstein and Rosen knew this. They were the first sliders, but they realized almost instantly that something was wrong. The first thing they did upon entering their first new dimension was to run scientific experiments to prove that it was the same Earth with the same physical laws, just causal independence in the way their histories unfolded.

But the equations didn’t balance. The constants were off. By millionths of a degree, but they were off. Einstein postulated that their mass transitioning between dimensions caused this imbalance, and left unchecked, would eventually cause all matter to unravel at a submolecular level, leaving the entire dimension a black, lifeless void of drifting hydrogen clouds. Einstein and Rosen abandoned the project and falsified their journals, “proving” the entire theory infeasible and hoping it would dissuade further research.

Things are spiraling out of control, or more appropriately, down the tubes. Quinn and the gang have been gallivanting around for years, poking holes between dimensions wherever they go. The holes look like they collapse, but they don’t. Not completely. The “fabric” metaphor of space and time is apt, because like a fabric, it frays, and if you punch holes in it, it leaks. The Kromaggs have been sending entire invasion fleets between dimensions, and they’re the first to notice something is desperately wrong. Entire outposts are vanishing. Entire planetary garrisons. All that’s left is slowly-dissipating hunks of base metals and gas, and the effect is starting to spread. There are so many holes now that the multiverse is beginning to hemorrhage dimensions into one another. They’re merging, compressing, expanding, or just outright exploding. It’s hard to tell, because the multiverse is desperately trying to find its own equilibrium point– to find a set of physical constants that fits.

That’s what Rembrandt finds when he brings his virus to Earth Prime– an already dying Kromagg race. Every planet they’ve taken is unraveling at its molecular seams, and they’ve been scrambling to find a reason why, falling back in desperation to their home dimension. Their extinction is already at hand. The world Remmy finds is one of chaos and mutation, where people can bend matter to their will and wield power akin to magic. Entropy is pulling worlds apart, and the only solution is more sliding, to try to find more Sliders, explain the situation to them, and find a way to stop it all.

But even with infinite possible realities, there may not be a way to fix what’s been broken. Infinity isn’t big as it used to be.

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