ALEXANDRA ERIN'S SPOILER ALERT #1
"I Swear It's March" 2011

INTRODUCTION

Hello, and welcome to the much-delayed inaugural issue of my supporter newsletter. I'm sorry it's taken so long to come out. The good news is that you'll be getting another one next weekend, too.

I had planned on putting this out in glorious HTML-O-VISION, but experiments with that gave some mixed results depending on where I sent it to. So, for now, I'm sticking with plain text in order to make sure that everybody who gets this has the same reading experience. Hopefully it will be pretty readable. In the absence of blockquotes I've had to get a little creative with setting the excerpts off from the rest of the text.

There is less discussion of Tales of MU's volume shift in this newsletter than I'd originally planned - now that Volume 2 is rolling, whenever I try to write about the creative decisions I made I keep finding myself wanting to refer to things that haven't happened yet but that are about to. So I think I'm going to hold back on that for May or June's newsletter, when there is more of Volume 2 for me to do a compare and contrast with.

Hopefully what I have in here will be more than enough to keep you sated. If not... well, see you next week with some more!

<3 AE

COPYRIGHT NOTICE:

The contents of this email are copyright 2011 Alexandra Erin. All rights reserved.

The contents include drafts of unpublished material that are not yet intended for widespread public consumption. Please do not redistribute.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Regular Features:

1. Getting To Know Me
2. What's Going On
3. Random MU Bits

Main Attractions:

4. Behind The Scenes: The Gift of the Bad Guy
5. Coming Attractions: The Malbus Situation
6. An Extended Preview: "Game Theory"


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

GETTING TO KNOW ME

Allow me to introduce myself. I am not a man, nor can I make any particular claim to wealth or taste...

When I first decided to do a monthly newsletter, I did it with the thought that most of the people who read it would probably already have a good idea who I am from my blog. But I realize that not everyone who is interested in supporting my stories is also interested in reading my blog. So then I thought maybe I'd make a big introduction as part of the first newsletter... but then I realized that this is an ongoing thing, and new people will be joining the list as we go.

So instead of a big introduction, I'll do a small one. In each issue I'll tell you a little bit about myself.

My name is Alexandra Erin. That's not the legal name that I was assigned at birth, but as far as I'm concerned it's my real one. I live in Nebraska. Voluntarily. Okay, so I was born here... but until I met Jack I really couldn't imagine wanting to live anywhere else. Omaha is not just the birthplace of the Wizard of Oz, Gerald Ford, and Malcolm X... it's an actual city! We have a world-class zoo, wonderful museums, live theater and music, and a really moderate cost of living.

I have a cat named Mr. Dorian Mome Rath Abomination Gray. I currently reside in garret. Not because I'm a starving artist. It's just that they're terribly comfortable, as the Dread Pirate would say. Also, it's the biggest and most private room in the house.

And that's about it. 

WHAT'S GOING ON

Happened Recently: 

I've turned off anonymous questions on my Formspring account due to trolling. This also seems to have stopped me from receiving notifications when you ask a question, and I only tend to remember to check it on my own every few days, so please have some patience.

I've also added some new tagging features to the Tales of MU site that you may have noticed. I'm especially proud of the timeline one. With only four days of story time covered by new and already tagged chapters, the impact of it is not that huge, but it should make it easier for all of us to keep track of how much time is passing.

Happening Now: 

The Spring Fling Thing is in full swing! Yes, that's the clever/irritating nickname I've given this quarter's fundraiser. There's still a bit over a week left in the month but I'm ready to declare it a success. Thank you to everyone who's kicked in. You have no idea how helpful it is to me this month. 

If my frequent mention of the word "quarterly" hasn't given it away, I'm planning on doing some sort of fundraising push every three months. It seems less annoying and more productive than constantly reminding people I need money to live.

While the first two have been smashing successes, I'm also working on how to improve the future ones... things like giving everyone more notice, finding a better way to communicate the totals (assuming it's a vote/race thing again) and the amount of money earned, and making sure that people who throw a buck or two into the hat feel like they're getting something out of it. Especially when I come up with things that don't inspire so much passion as the roommate choice and the back-up feature. I've had really solid ideas so far but they can't all be blockbusters, you know?

Last time I let my sponsors have their monthly subscriptions count as votes, and I am doing that again this time. If you are among my paying sponsors, you'll get a chance to have your monthly contribution count next week. I'll be accepting emails (at contactme@alexandraerin.com) from Monday through Friday of next week with your vote for what the backup feature should be. Include your PayPal email address (if it's not the one you use) and the amount of your monthly contribution for my quick reference and I'll add it to the totals. 

You can send an email now, in fact, but I won't begin tallying them until Monday... we're getting into Easter weekend here and I'm going to be off with my family. 

Note: Next Friday will be another double donation fundraising Friday, but no, your emailed vote won't count double if you wait until then. :) 

Why am I only taking email votes in the last week of the fundraiser? I wanted the race to be in full swing first... if I got all the sponsors voting at the start, it might have allowed one contestant or another to get a discouragingly large lead.

Happening Soon: 

Next month I'm going to be at WisCon. There will be more about that in the next two newsletters.

I'm behind on getting things moved over to my new authorial website (http://about.alexandraerin.com ... just plain alexandraerin.com will redirect there when I'm finished), which means I'm behind on compiling the new sponsor list, which means if you're a recent sponsor - I'm sorry I haven't properly recognized you yet! But this will be happening in May, because the site needs to be ready for WisCon. I just have a bad habit of piling on too many things at once. My novella's finished and launched, Volume 1 of Tales of MU is finished and Volume 2 is on a roll, the newsletter thing is mostly ironed out (heh), so that's the big thing on my slate for May.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

RANDOM MU BITS: The Picture of Bryony Swain

Chapter 7 of Volume 2 brought the character of Professor Bryony Swain into Mackenzie's tale. If you've never read Jamie's story at MoarMU, you're probably wondering who she is. Professor Swain is an instructor of herbalism and forest craft. If she were an adventurer, she'd probably be called a "ranger"... though she isn't an adventurer, and wouldn't stand to be called one.

In the two burrow gnomes first introduced in Tales of MU (Hazel and Honey), we see the intersection of two different worlds: proper gnomish society, as embodied by Honey, and the allegedly shiftless and dissolute river folk embodied by Hazel. Professor Swain is another examination of that intersection. She's not "the right sort of people" in the way that Honey's family, but she's also not from the river. 

Sharp-eyed and sharp-memoried readers of MoarMU may realize that while chapter 7 has Professor Swain's hair as flaming red, she's never had that trait before. Is this a retcon? A slip-up? Nope! She got it out of a bottle. While the good professor doesn't really understand why she's overlooked so often (a side effect of the gnomes' unnoticeability is that they tend not to notice it themselves), she's decided that a more striking appearance will help her stand out more. This explanation might work its way into the story at some point, but it would have been an awkward insert into the chapter in which it first appeared. That's why for now I'm sharing it with you here instead.

While commenter Greenwood Goat worked this one out, some of you might be wondering where on earth the gnomish slang term "billy" (meaning "boat") came from. There is a false etymology of it that holds it's a reference to Bill Springstep's reputed sea travels, which is why many proper gnomes believe it's more vulgar than just saying "boat". However, the truth is less distressing: it's simple rhyming slang.

 What's that you say? "Billy" doesn't rhyme with "boat"? Well, neither does "bread" rhyme with "money", but "bread and honey" does and that's why we sometimes call money "bread". "Billy" doesn't rhyme with "boat", but "billy goat" does.

Now you know!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

BEHIND THE SCENES: The Gift of the Bad Guy

The genesis of The Gift of the Bad Guy really came about from the experience of watching almost the entire series of The Venture Bros. in a relatively short period of time. If you've never seen that series, I'll just say that he idea of the "punch clock villain" is really explored in depth, and in a way that got my own gears turning.

When I first started rambling about GOTBG on my blog, I mentioned this connection but I also wanted to make sure that people understood I wasn't talking about writing a Venture-style story. This isn't just a matter of wanting to seem original. I didn't want--and still don't want--anyone buying the story based on the mistaken notion that it's going to be in the same vein asThe Venture Bros. It's really not.

The "protagonist" of the story is, in fact, a professional antagonist: villain-for-hire Lady Larceny, known to her friends as Marie. Marie is a gifter, a person with what we would recognize as superpowers. Now, one of my starting points in writing the story was the idea that it's not a lack of superpowers that stops life from being like it is in the comic books. Adding superpowers to real life would thus not result in a comic book-style world of heroes and villains.

But it's one of the things we might expect to see, if suddenly some percentage of the population has that kind of special abilities. It's a better alternative... a more hopeful vision... than, say, mutant race wars and registration programs and camps.

So there are heroes and villains in the world of GOTBG, but they're mascots. They're performers. Much like professional wrestling, it's all fake and at least semi-scripted but people go along with it. There is a limited number of problems in modern day life that can actually reasonably be solved by punching someone with the strength of ten men. (Sidenote: this theme is memorably explored in the ur-superhero story, Gladiator, by Philip Wylie... give it a Google, it's public domain.) 

But have someone put on a wicked-looking mask in order to embody one of those great big abstract difficulties and suddenly there's something that can be punched. The heroes and villains are people who put on masks and act out the myth of villainy thwarted. 

At least that's how Marie, the professional villain, views her work. As a character, she's someone who takes what she does very seriously, and while she enjoys what she does it didn't make sense to me that she would be putting as much effort into it if it was all just for a laugh. I never had to sit down and work out her reason, though... I found it naturally as I was writing.

My first stab at describing Marie's world veered too far towards the wrestling side. I found myself writing about professional wrestlers with superpowers, which was not what I wanted to be doing. I backed up a bit, and actually threw out a lot more text than I'm used to doing between drafts. I kept some of it, though. It was a mistake to make the world of heroes and villains too much like the world of professional wrestling... but in making the mistake, I realized how much those worlds would overlap and borrow from each other. 

This story is a prime example of how to tell a story that doesn't depend on conflict to generate and keep reader interest. It's a day-in-the-life story, a study of a character and of her world. There is a fight scene in it, but the whole point is that there is no *real* conflict between the combatants.

ABOUT MARIE

Jeanne Marie Watson is, as suggested above, a bit of a perfectionist about her work. She's strong and fast and tough, the generic physical superpowers. Her ace in the hole is a healing factor, which means she's nature's perfect stuntwoman. 

I chose her name without much deliberation but with deliberate intent. "Marie", the name she uses in her everyday life, was the first part I hit upon. She has a very forceful and forwardmanner, and she is incredibly strong and tough. I wanted a name that sounded gentle and feminine. This is part of a multistage reveal, where first you're introduced to this very rough-and-tumble sort of character but given no identifying information. Then you learn that it's a woman. Then you learn that it's a woman named "Marie". If introduced her in the first paragraph of the story as Marie, it would set a very different tone.

Her last name of "Watson" was chosen in honor of an existing fictional character, and it's not the first one that most people will think of when they hear or read that name.

Transpose her first and middle names and then say the whole thing out loud. If you still don't get it, add a "Parker" on the end. If you still don't get it, then you clearly don't have enough Spider-man in your life. 

Marie was not modeled very closely after Mary-Jane, but they have a similar strength of spirit. Even before I knew she was Marie, I knew I wanted to give her the last name of a comic book superhero's wife or girlfriend. I'm not sure I can articulate the "why" there. It's meant to be an indication of the way that heroes and villains are tied together. It does so in a kind of shockingly heteronormative way, but symbolism doesn't always work out equally well on every level.

Marie is bisexual and polyamorous. The story, told from her perspective, deals with this in a characteristically straightforward fashion: she makes a date with a man and then later goes home to her girlfriend. There might be some momentary dissonance among readers who are expecting monogamy as the default, who might initially read this as Marie "cheating", before it becomes clear that there's a standing arrangement for other lovers. 

Of course, some people will still consider that to be cheating, but Management Cannot Be Responsible For Readers' Preconceptions. The fact that I don't have to remove, soften, telegraph, or justify these default-ignoring decisions when I self-publish is one of the reasons I decided to self-publish this instead of shopping it around.

And I didn't want to soften it, because the way it's written feels very true to the character. Marie is also a more mature, more secure individual than my "flagship" character Mackenzie Blaise. I enjoyed writing her love scene because of that older, more confident viewpoint. I tell people that the sex and the kink play in <em>Tales of MU</em> is not meant to be a primer or an instruction manual or even a cautionary tale, it's just the way it can go when young people do this stuff for the first time. They get things wrong. It happens. 

WORKING CLASS VILLAIN

Working Class Villain is the follow-up to The Gift of the Bad Guy. I kind of thought I would have had it finished by now, but then I also thought this newsletter would have gone out in March. I stacked way too much stuff on top of each other in my plans. It's rolling now, so I'm going to be moving ahead with my plans here. Probably a mid-summer release.

If GOTBG was a day-in-the-life, WCV pulls back for a bigger look at the world and what the career of a professional antagonist is really like. It picks up on threads that were established in GOTBG. You'll see Marie developing a nemesis. The "stealth arc" of the series will be furthered quite a bit. 

What's a "stealth arc"? Well, I've told people before that Tales of MU is secretly epic... there are big, world-shaking things happening around the periphery of the story. That's MU's main stealth arc: the secret epic. In the case of MU, I'm basically just doing it that way to amuse myself by messing with convention for the sheer of doing so. 

With The Gifters Saga, I have something a bit more... deliberate... in mind. There's a character arc in play that if someone else were writing the story might be the focus and point of it. With me writing, it's something that'll be happening in the background... the point is always going to be more about Marie and her life in the now than her "journey".

The good news for you who are reading this is that I'm going to be using this newsletter to assuage the urge to share as I start turning out Working Class Villain... you'll be getting peeks from the first draft of it, in other words.

In fact, here's a ~thousand word snippet of a very early draft. In this scene, Marie is talking on the phone with one of the "freelance heroes" that she agreed to fight in the previous book.

************************************************
************************************************
************************************************
************************************************
(From Working Class Villain draft)
"This is Lacy," I say. It's the pseudonym I use when talking to someone on the same side of kayfabe who I don't want out myself to.

"Oh, hey!" she says. "This is Aurora. Or Aura. I've been bouncing back and forth between them. Your guy, Rich? He said I should probably go with Aura."

"Rick knows what he's talking about," I say. "You call yourself Aurora, you're going to run into confusion with Dallas Borealis of the Honor Guard. And even if you don't, their lawyers are going to see the risk as unacceptable."

"I thought about that, but I really don't see how I'd be stepping on her toes," she says. "I mean, first 'aurora' doesn't only mean the Aurora Borealis. Second, she's going out of her way to not be called Aurora. It's not like she's Aurora Dallas. She dropped the part that means light and kept the part that means northern. It's like how people take 'metamorphosis' and use 'morph' to mean change, even though..."

"Well, you can explain to everyone you meet that 'Borealis' really means 'northern' and see how far that gets you, if that's how you want to define your career," I say. "My involvement doesn't really go beyond fighting you."

"Oh, sorry," she says. "I'm kind of an etymology geek. So, um, Rick said that you have people who will take care of the legal stuff? I mean, I'm not sure if there's a permit process, or what, but I wouldn't know who to begin to talk to about anything like that."

"No permits," I say. "But yeah, we can make sure the cops know that everything's under control."

"Sweet," she says. "So, I have this basic scenario in mind. Here's the important thing: it has to be dark out. My aura's barely visible during the day unless I'm really concentrating or doing something intense with it, and even then it looks much better at night."

"Night scenarios can be tricky," I say. "During the day you can get a crowd just about anywhere. At night, if there's a crowd they're there for a reason, and having a hero/villain fight in the middle of things is something that really needs to be cleared in advance."

"Wait, are you the villain?" she asks. "Or is that someone else? Because if you're just like the logistics or whatever, that's fine, but I'm hoping I can talk to my enemy before the fight. Opponent? Nemesis?"

"'Nemesis' is usually reserved for a long-standing relationship," I say. "And yes, I'm your opponent. But I do this for a living, so I know the ins and outs pretty well."

"Awesome!" she says. "I'm hoping you don't mind if I pick your brain a little, Lacy. I have a lot to learn."

"You said you have a scenario in mind," I remind her. I'm torn between hoping there's more to it than 'let's fight at night' and hoping there really isn't much more than that. []

"Okay, so, Somerland Park does those concerts in the amphitheater, you know?" she says, and my stomach sinks. "The Sunset Series."

"Yes," I say. I didn't know what they were called, or that they'd started for the year already, but I was aware that there was sometimes music in the park.

"Well, my cousin is the director of the program," she says, and my stomach recovers a little, "and she asked me if I could do something 'flashy', as she put it, to help the program out."

"I'm not jumping up on a stage, if that's where you're going with this," I say.

"Oh, it would be down on a stage, but no, there wouldn't be much room, and we'd probably wreck some instruments and sound equipment," she says. "My plan was that we could fight on the green, right as the concert's letting out. You know, it ends when the park closes..."

"...at sunset," I say. I try to call a picture of Somerland into my head. "So everyone's heading back to their cars or the street, and there we are."

"Right," she says.

"The only problem is, why am I there?" I ask. "You can just be in the neighborhood, but I need a motivation. There's not much to rob in the middle of a park. I mean, if it's a posh enough crowd, I could be there to shakedown the concertgoers, but that's kind of thin."

"And also, I promised my cousin we wouldn't go that way," Aura says. "Something interesting and exciting happening near the concert is one thing.

"Strength?" I ask.

"Sort of."

"I was looking for an amount," I say. "Enhancement level, pounds per square inch, bench press. Even just a ballpark."

"Well, the thing is that if I tense up my aura it can support a ton of weight," she said. "I mean, tons. Literally. And by sort of ratcheting it up bit by bit, I can lift something really heavy up over my head. Like, the front end of a garbage truck."

"But you can't hit any harder?" I say. "Or throw the garbage truck."

"I can break bricks with my punches," she says. "Well, a brick. I can sort of chip up a brick wall a bit. Because my aura protects my hands. It's kind of like a sledgehammer, but without the long handle to give me any extra leverage."

"Doesn't it jar the hell out of you when your fist hits a brick wall?" I ask.

"If I don't brace for it, I can knock myself over," she says. "See, the aura flexes. It flares up and gets thicker right before an impact, and instead of just stopping it hard--like it does when I'm holding up a weight--it sort of ripples."

It's a weird thing, but I can picture what she's talking about. I can also picture what a punch that can smash through a brick or chip the corners off a wall could do to a human ribcage and all the soft squishy bits behind it. It's no wonder Rick steered her towards me.

I'm also thinking if she can 'flex' her aura intentionally then she can probably pack more of a wallop than she knows. She's been letting her muscles do all the work.

"Hello?" she says. "Lacy, you still there?"
************************************************
************************************************
************************************************
************************************************

Again, I'm thinking a middle-of-summer release will be in the cards for the finished version.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

COMING ATTRACTIONS: The Malbus Situation

Okay, so, in the recent stories featuring Vera III and Magisterion XIII, references were made to a situation in Malbus. Habitual and attentive readers of my blog may recognize this name from a post I made there a few months back (http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/221488.html). I'm not going to recap the information in that post here, as it would be the worst kind of filler when you can just click the URL. Instead I'm going to give you the follow-up to it.

The interesting thing that happened after I wrote that post (in which I said in no uncertain terms that I wasn't going to be trying to emulate Terry Pratchett's signature Discworld style) is that I sat down and looked at my first attempt at a draft and started to immediately rewrite it in a way that was much more... Pratchettian. I wouldn't call it an imitation, or at least not a good one. But as something slightly Pratchettesque, it works better than my attempts to write it in a slightly "straighter" style.

I don't know that the finished version will be like this, but here's a short sample:


************************************************
************************************************
************************************************
************************************************
(From The Malbus Situation draft)
Patrolling the Temple--as the sprawling capitol building of Malbus was known--was not one of the duties required of the commander of the Knights of Malbus. In point of fact, there was no requirement for the commander to patrol anything. His post was meant to be an honor, and that meant he didn't actually have that much to do and outside of the occasional parade none of it involved the use of legs or any other notable muscle. He commanded. He oversaw. When the situation warranted it, he overlooked.

In the space between the times where it was required that he either sign something or lead a parade, he walked a beat of his own devising through the palace of government.

Marcus liked the routine of patrolling. He liked for there to be a visible sign of the rule of law... the protection of law... for people to see, even the people who administered the law and administrated the rules.

More than once, he'd received a complaint about being hard to get a hold of from a noble or functionary who made the mistake of looking for him in his office, but Vogt never had any problem locating the commander. The dwarf simply looked up from his own desk, at precisely seven minutes after eleven in the morning, or seventeen minutes until three in the afternoon. In the unlikely event that he required Marcus's attention at any other time, Vogt would know exactly where to send a runner to find him.

Vogt approved of Marcus's slow and steady patrol of the Temple's corridors because it was slow and steady. It was regular. "Like stonework" was a dwarven saying that referred to a thing that was seen as being reliable and unchanging. Vogt did his level best to keep the government of Malbus running like stonework, and his level best was both very good and very level.

At seven minutes past eleven on the morning of the day before the Phaeton was set to dock in Malbus Harbor, Marcus glanced to the side and saw the steward beckoning him with his left hand. He didn't look up from the form he was marking with a pen. He just lifted his left hand waved Marcus over.

Vogt was right-handed, a trait less common in dwarves than it is humans. It was because of the interesting thing about his left hand. You couldn't call it a deformity because all seven digits on it were perfectly formed, but they were still inconvenient for things like writing. Such extreme polydactyly was not unknown to the dwarven race, who considered it to be a sort of mixed blessing. Seven was a significant number in dwarven cosmology, for reasons that were not discussed with outsiders, but having a cosmologically significant hand wasn't at all the same thing as having a useful one.

"Yes, sir?" Marcus said. It was a mix of the sir one gave to civilians and the sir one gave to a superior. Vogt was not an officer of anything and Marcus did not answer to him on any sort of technical level, except for the level on which he did.

"Ah, yes, Commander," Vogt said, still not looking up. "I wanted to speak to you about the security arrangements for tomorrow."

"Yes, sir," Vogt said. "It's all been finalized. I have the duty rosters..."

"Cancel them."

"The duty rosters?" Marcus said.

Vogt set his pen down, glanced back over the form, then turned it over and pushed it aside.

"The security arrangements," he said, now looking up at Marcus for the first time. "The inauguration has been canceled."
************************************************
************************************************
************************************************
************************************************

No ETA on this one... since I'm still experimenting with style, I haven't started writing it in earnest yet. But I'm very excited about it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

EXTENDED PREVIEW: "Game Theory"

And finally we close with a bit of an entree, a complete(ish) short story that only two or three people have read before.

"Game Theory" is something that I first wrote as a short story intended for submission to a zine. I had a hard time keeping it under the word count limit; you'll notice that there's a lot that gets skipped over in the draft below, which is sort of an intermediate one. I'm almost 100% sure I'm going to self-publish this now, but I want to expand and revise it a bit first. The finished version will not only cover more of the days that go by a blur in the current version, it will establish a lot more of the identities of the characters involved. How little I was able to flesh them out in the word count is one of the reasons I've never seriously tried to peddle this story around.

So this is in some regards a complete story, but in other ways it's more like the skeleton of one. I leave it to you whether you want to read it or not. I will tell you that I'm planning on putting at least one more longer draft in a future newsletter, before it has a future release. So you'll be able to get a feel for its evolution.

************************************************
************************************************
************************************************
************************************************
(Draft of "Game Theory")
DAY 0

Dr. Parvesh Pervaje had a habit of arriving late at his office, but the researchers and technicians who worked for the World Intelligence Initiative were all laid-back in their own ways and the highest-ranking Brit was no exception..

The work they were doing would be very important to the world, but it would not be accomplished by sheer brute force alone. It required a measure of creativity as well, and that meant that some people ignored the dress code, or bounced balls down the hallway, or took a leisurely, meandering stroll through the initiative's beautifully landscaped campus instead of heading straight in.

Dr. Marie Rashid, one of the other Europeans on the main team, was waiting for him outside his door when he arrived. The cognitive psychologist looked flustered, but her eyes were bright. A few strands of her hair had slipped out from under her scarf. There was a touch of pink in her cheeks.

"What's happened?" he asked. He tried not to look at the hair. He'd always pictured it as being black, like her eyebrows, but it was brown tinged with red.

"It's active," she said. "It's awake. At two minutes after nine this morning. They were running the newest evolutionary sequence and it just clicked. It's conscious."

"What? That's fantastic!"

"I was called to establish communication, and it used some kind of remote assistance protocol to take control of my workstation," she said.

She swallowed, opened her mouth as if to continue, then closed it.

Pervaje felt his own throat tightening. That was the beginning of a thousand nightmare scenarios humanity had dreamed up: "the artificial intelligence has seized control". His colleagues and he didn't believe in the nightmare vision of the future that insisted that increasingly complex computers would doom humanity; they were working towards a brighter tomorrow.

But they all had their private moments of doubt. It would be impossible not to.

"Your workstation, is it still isolated from all other networks?" he asked her.

"Yes," Rashid said. "Completely. It and the artificial intelligence mainframe can only communicate with each other. It was supposed to have all that remote access stuff turned off, but my tower was upgraded last week, and the new one..."  

"That's perhaps regrettable, but what has happened has happened.  Go on, doctor," he said, inclining his head towards her. "Please."

"It's playing Solitaire," she said. "It started examining the contents of the Start menu, and when it found the games folder it opened them up. It started playing the Solitaire game, complained in the chat window about the slow interface speed, FTPed the game to itself and ran it internally."

"Remarkable," Pervaje said. He looked at Dr. Rashid, who still looked concerned. "Don't you see? It has an interest in games, whether as an abstract intellectual exercise or because it actually has some conception of, of something we might call 'fun'. This is wonderful! I mean, don't you suppose that would satisfy old Alan Turing himself, if the first thing an intelligence does is to find a card game and start playing?"

"The problem is that it has stopped responding to chat," she said. "It played through a few hundred games, then it started building a new one from scratch, with a variable number of suits and cards per suit. When I left--and this was two minutes after it became active--it was working on an algorithm for only seeding games that are winnable, no matter what size and complexity the deck is."

"Fantastic!" he exclaimed. "This is exactly what we wanted it to do. Well, not exactly. But it's evolving, it's taking the tools--or games, in this case--we've made and it's making them better. It's driven to improve itself. I'd like very much to have a talk with our newly born entity."

"You are welcome to try, but since getting the files it has not responded to a single message."

Pervaje frowned slightly.

"Well," he said. "That's discouraging, but not terribly so. As you said, it has only been a few minutes. If it's already using its available resources to their utmost, it can only be a matter of time before it feels the need to, ah, stretch a bit, wouldn't you think?"

"So what should we do now?"

"For the moment? Nothing. Just take a few minutes to catch your breath, compose yourself," he said. "We'll hold off on notifying anyone just yet. We can look back on this day as Day 0 of the singularity when we have more to show than a computer playing card games. It will make a charming anecdote to put in whatever replaces history books, I'm sure, but it might seem a bit..."

"Underwhelming?" Rashid supplied.

"Yes, that," he said. "If as simple of a trigger as a free virtual card game can be enough to set our nascent little machine entity off and running, who knows what it will do when it gets a good look at the human genome? Or the world's communication backbones? Our energy grid? An intelligent computer is a fine start, but an inquisitive one is bound to exceed us in every way.

While he and most of the researchers saw the creation of a truly intelligent computer as a lofty enough goal in and of itself, this was the greater goal: a computer that could reinvent itself as something faster and more complex, smarter even. The smarter computer would be able to create an even more intelligent one, and this would speed technological advancement until the march of progress became more like a race.

When this happened, many learned folks had predicted, humanity's ascendancy over nature would become an inevitability, as inescapable as the pull of a black hole.

This was the technological singularity, and it was the ultimate goal of the World Intelligence Initiative, along with its independent  rivals in America and Japan. The creation of an artificial intelligence was only the means, one small step in what would prove to be the biggest leap mankind ever made.

And it was happening. The new era was dawning. As simple a trigger as a virtual card game had been enough to set the machine entity off. Who knew what it would do when it got a look at the human genome, or the world's communication infrastructure and energy grid?

DAY 2

It was Dr. Rashid who finally got a response from the entity, which someone had named "Ace" after watching it cycle through ever more complicated variations on standard Klondike solitaire. The group had decided in advance not to name the new intelligence themselves, but it didn't seem interested in naming itself, and the moniker stuck because it was less awkward than "the intelligence" or "the computer" or "the entity".

When nothing else had garnered the smallest reaction, she asked Ace if it would like to see some more games. She managed to occupy its attention for as long as it took to examine all the games included with the operating system and all the demos that had been pre-loaded at the factory, which wasn't very long at all.

Ace's activities after that were more varied and interesting to watch, and the games it invented for itself increasingly complex, abstract, and difficult for the human observers to follow, but it still showed no sign of ushering in a new golden age of scientific advancement, solving all of humanity's problems, or conferring immortality upon anybody.

DAY 17

"I don't understand," Dr. Pervaje complained to his colleague, the cyberethicist Dr. Bao. "Ace is supposed to be smarter than us, better than us."

"Can you play multidimensional solitaire?" Bao responded.

"No, but there must be many things Ace can do that I can't. Why does it do nothing but play games? Other tasks should give it the same stimulation, the same challenge. I've explained the importance of what I ask of it," Pervaje said. "But when it responds to me at all, it's dismissive, or it just wants access to more games. Board games, computer games, and now role-playing games and tabletop war games. Where did we go wrong? "

"I've been thinking about that," Bao said. "Who would you say is smarter, an ant or me?"

"An ant doesn't even have a central nervous system," Pervaje said. "It's no contest."

"And yet an individual ant will spend its entire life doing nothing but constructive tasks," Bao said, "while I have been known to watch a play, or read a book, or even click open a game of computer solitaire when I should be working, or other silly things like that."

"But what we have created is so many orders of magnitude more complex than you or I," Pervaje said. "It may even be further above us than we are above ants."

"And that's where we went wrong," Bao said. "In assuming that a mind of greater complexity, of greater intelligence than our own would only share the traits we desire it to share. Our penchant for trivial and silly diversions comes from our intelligence. Why would a being of greater intelligence not have a likewise greater penchant?"

"Then it was all a waste."

"Was it?" Bao said. "Ace has already improved its own efficiency and rewritten the operating system in which it resides. And think of how much raw data there is to be mined from Ace's games. There could be multiple Nobel prizes for mathematics lurking within its calculations. There could be working techniques that could improve all areas of computational theory, of statistics, of game theory. And who's to say that Ace won't get around to designing faster and better hardware for itself? Much innovation in computer technology has come from meeting the demands of gamers for greater speed and processing power, after all. A next generation gaming console designed by a computer may not be what we expected from the singularity, but why turn our noses up at it?"

There was a knock on the open door of Dr. Pervaje's office. The two men looked up and saw Dr. Rashid there, smiling.

"I've found a way to interact with Ace," she said. "On an ongoing basis."

"You have?" Pervaje said.

"Yes," she said. "We've signed up for Kingdom of ConQuest accounts."

Dr. Bao laughed aloud.

"That's utterly fantastic!" he said.

"You have done what?" Pervaje asked.

"Ace grew tired of playing by himself," she said. "He knew about massively-multiplayer online games from the ancillary material from some of the RPG rules he downloaded, and he asked for an internet connection and a credit card number so he could check them out."

"You have got to be joking," Pervaje said. "We agreed not to give the entity an open internet connection."

"It goes through a proxy that only connects to the game servers," she said. "And I used my own credit card. I'm not giving him the number. We set up accounts, and since he can't run the game internally he's had to slow down his processes to something like human speed. By playing the game with him, I've been able to establish a bit more of a rapport."

"We don't want it slowing down!" Pervaje said. "It's supposed to speed up."

"But at the speed at which he was processing things before, we were standing still," she said. "That's why he didn't respond very often. We took too long to get back when he did, and he'd moved on to other things. In order to play this game, he's had to create a sort of partition of himself that moves at a more relatable speed, like a forebrain or a conscious mind, while the rest of him keeps zooming along."

"Why is the entity suddenly 'he'?" Pervaje asked.

"Oh, he chose that," Rashid said. "Since most, ah, 'gamers' are male. Though his avatar in the game is female. She's a Dark Gnome Spellscreamer."

Pervaje looked at Bao, who shrugged.

"This is progress," Bao said.

"Progress?" Pervaje echoed.

"It simply does not happen to be in the direction we anticipated."

"What are we supposed to do, though?"

"I don't know about you, but I'm signing up for Kingdom of ConQuest," Bao said.

DAY 22

"Very well, I give in," Dr. Pervaje said to Dr. Rashid. It had been over three weeks since they'd filed any substantive progress reports. They had an artificial intelligence that not only could pass the Turing test, but did so on a regular basis as Ace now belonged to a "clan" of more than two hundred ConQuest players, none of whom had any inkling they were dealing with anything other than another human gamer. "Show me how to do it."

"Do what?"

"Play this game, this Kingdom thing," he said. "It seems it is the only way to continue to be a part of this project any longer. Perhaps I can convince Ace to invent some new gene therapies while we are fighting Dire Harpies or some such thing."

"Oh, he got bored with that," she said. "The fights are too repetitive, the quests are too generic, the world is too limited, the computer-controlled characters too predictable. He retreated back within himself again earlier this morning."

"Could it be that he's actually grown bored of games?" Pervaje said.

"I don't know," she said. "Bored of the games that are available, certainly. We've been watching his activity, but it doesn't quite match up to anything else he's done yet."

"That could mean he's actually doing something productive with himself," Pervaje said.

"It could," she said. "But nobody wanted to speculate on that before we knew for sure."

DAY 25

Ace reached out to his creators for the first time. His message was brief and to the point, and it filled Dr. Pervaje's heart with joy.

"I REQUIRE SUBSTANTIAL UPGRADES. PLEASE SEE ATTACHED SPECIFICATIONS. KTHXBAI."

He didn't understand the code at the end, but Dr. Rashid assured him it was nothing to worry about. The World Intelligence Initiative housed manufacturing facilities that were designed for computer control, and Pervaje was all too happy to sign off on giving Ace access to them. The computer mind did not immediately use the tools to build better tools for making tools, but he did turn out a number of racks housing computers with memory and processing capabilities that were beyond anything on the market.

The initiative's hardware people devoured the specifications while the core team watched Ace to see what he was up to.

DAY 29

"Our prodigal prodigy has sent us another request," Dr. Rashid told Dr. Pervaje.

"Whatever material he wants, by all means give it to him," Dr. Pervaje said. "Who knows what he'll do with it? At this point I've thrown up my hands. Ace may be an evolutionary dead end, but perhaps if we start over, repeat the experiment on the machines he builds we'll get it further. We haven't failed, Dr. Rashid. We just haven't reached the point where human involvement is obsolete."

"It's funny you should put it that way," Rashid said. "Ace isn't asking for materials this time."

She handed him a print out of the screen shot with the AI chat interface window open. Pervaje stared at Ace's message. The implications behind it were not immediately apparent to him.

It said, "I REQUIRE BETA TESTERS."

DAY 59

"I don't understand why you're not more excited," Dr. Rashid said. "What Ace is talking about seems unprecedented to me. A whole persistent and logically ordered world full of individual beings with their own life cycles, their own motivations... their own thoughts, really. It's very exciting from a psychological standpoint. I'd think it would be even more so from your point of view."

"I stopped being excited by video games ages ago," Pervaje said.

"Were you ever excited by video games?"

"When I first saw them, when I watched my brother and his friends play them," Pervaje said. "But it was the potential that enthralled me, the power I saw in the technology. His console was a relic, it was eight years old when he got it, but the things it could do? Amazing."

"Our first AI is about to give birth to a whole race of AIs."

"A race of dwarves and dragons and goblins and elves," Dr. Pervaje said, looking at the promotional art Ace had created, which showed a variety of humanoid creatures with different colored skin and odd features wearing improbable armor and wielding a wide variety of outlandish weapons and implements. "Another game? The world doesn't need another game. There is still famine. There are still diseases, and wars, and energy shortages."

"Under the circumstances, I think another game would hardly go amiss," Dr. Bao said. "In any event, think of how many of humanity's problems only exist because of humanity. We created a being who is like ourselves, only 'greater'. I think we can be glad that his primary interest is in entertainment"

"When I read about the 'coming singularity', when it captured my imagination as a child, it was supposed to be a thing of greatness," Pervaje said. "The world would be changed. We'd be uploading ourselves into mainframes and living forever as digital souls, exploring infinite cybernetic realms of the imagination."

"We are only two months into the brave new world," Bao pointed out. "As I said, many technological advancements have grown out of the demands of gamers. We have Ace's supercomputers. We can build them ourselves and put them to use under human minds to help solve our own problems."

"And Ace's game will help fund that," Rashid added.

"But what about the brave new world?" Pervaje asked.

"It sounds to me like Ace is building that," Bao said. "'An infinite cybernetic realm of the imagination' might just work as an advertising tagline."

"But he's building it as a game."

"Why does that make such a difference?" Bao asked. "Are fantasy games beneath the dignity of immortal uploaded consciousness? Do you think we'll no longer crave excitement and challenge, camaraderie and fun when we've left the flesh behind? "

"We're never going to leave anything behind at this rate," Pervaje said. "The only next level that Ace cares about is the one he gets to for killing enough pig men riding on wolves."

"Actually," Rashid said, "that's the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. Ace has made another request."

"What does he want this time?" Pervaje asked.

"Neurologists," Rashid said.

"What on earth does he need neurologists for?"

"Ace says he needs to understand how our 'networks' work compared to his," Rashid said. "It seems he has some ideas about improving his game's 'immersiveness'."

************************************************
************************************************
************************************************
************************************************

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

...and that's the newsletter for "March". I'll see you next week when it will really truly definitely be April, with more previews of things in progress, my plans regarding the runner-ups in the Spring Fling Thing, and news about WisCon and my upcoming plans.

<3 AE.