Magenta Monster

The main characters are Sam and Mack – they are a married couple with two children.

Sam: mother, part time climbing instructor, science – probably Geology undergraduate degree, obsessed with games, scifi and all things geeky, is the driving force behind the Lovecraft Computer Game. She is fit, and a bit of a health nut and unsure of herself in many ways.

Mack: Loving father and husband, a computer programmer with fear of not being able to support his family and guilt complex about ruining his wife’s career, has a high stress job and self confidence issues. He has taken up a self defence system called Krav Marga to help with confidence and to keep him fit and as the result of an almost attack.

I thought I would share some of the visuals I have produced for the character Punku who is the main protagonist of the stories based in the Punk’s world or universe (funny that!). She is an aquatic and land ape hibred who has had alterations made to her body to allow her to synch with optronics (glass based system that works like electronics – think fibre optics), she was brought up by the elite of aquatic apes and has also had life extension and has live for basically all of our history. She can assimilate DNA and adapt to situations so there is some variance on her appearance though out the stories.

She has one surviving sibling though initially they do not know they are siblings and are best friends. He is called Itsu or Jess depending on which part of the story we are looking at – he is also the root of the Apollo myth in Greccio-Roman traditions.

Lovecraft was not writing fiction but a distorted and confused version of the truth. He and his parents found a lost city beneath the ocean with wetware technology that is made of meat, is alive and can use tenticals to jack into your brain.

The adventure left the family damaged resulting in both parents going completely mad and Lovecraft loosing his maths abilities. His father’s journal explaining the adventure ends up with Lovecraft’s ex wife and falls into the hands of a scholar who is doing a bit of extra research for a computer game him and his two friends are making.

Like the Lovecraft’s before them the three friends end up embroiled in an attempted silencing as the ocean city is a deep secret that could rip our world apart.

Been thinking about the cover I want for the book, find I am thinking something along the lines of tenticles holding keys or a game controller and symbols fading over the top giving the whole thing a sort of old sepia look. Not really sure, would love to be able to pay someone for a cover but thinking I may have to do it myself again – though I have been eyeing up some other artists work!

In some ways the being able to draw thing is a pain because I feel I should do it myself to make my budget stretch further/get the thing actually out there in the first place. But I know I am not capable of producing what I actually want :/

Oh well I suppose I need to get the drawing stuff out to do some more comic book work and what have you anyway.

Since starting the NaNoWriMo writing challenges in 2009 I have been working on the same world/universe, initially in novel form and then in comic book form. The comic book was initially only supposed to be a world building exercise but took on a life of it’s own and also broke me out of the stifling idea that it all had to be novels.

I have since written flash fictions and short stories based in the world along with novellettes and possibly novellas. So after writing a hell of a lot more of these flash fictions for both GothNoWriMo (the October writing challenge) and NaNo this year – I have decided to assemble a collection or two.

They are called:

The Punk 100

Punk Flash

Punk Shorts

A Little Taste of Punk

Punk Mini

Punk Micro

Punk Layer

The Punk’s World

The Punk’s Universe

Punku

I will probably start with The Punk 100 which will contain 100 things about the Punk’s world or Universe. Mainly it will be Flash Fiction with some micro fiction, comic strip, short stories, novelettes and one novella.

I am currently not even sure if I have enough material but I am sure that if I do not already then I will be close and I have a lot more stories planned out so it shouldn’t be too hard to get there. Then all I need to do is collate, edit, proof, typeset, sort a cover, ISBN and publish (probably forgotten something there!).

But NOT until the end of November may I start such a project 🙂

Within the Punk’s Universe there are really three different phases of space stuff at the moment with a possibility of more. The first is the Aquatic Apes or Elders who had an advanced Interplanetary Space programme that was just about to go Interstellar and possibly even managed it!

So that means we are looking at stories based on Mars, the Moon, asteroids, Europa and other sundry bodies I’ve decided might be habitable with advanced technology. The Martian one is underground in a cave system and is extinct which is why it is only discovered in “our” future once peopl actually set foot on the surface. The lunar colony is equally dead and was based in a large dark patch at the bottom of the moon on the dark side.

The asteroids are all going to be different with old experiments having been left to evolve and stuff (this is another story element that came out of a nightmare).

There is also the planet Nemises which is an extra solar planet which has been snagged by our sun and orbits erratically not in the planetary plain. This colony was a secret on one of the three empires and set up as a purity camp for their nazi-esk beliefs. It is an extant colony though has gone through some interesting bottle necks and has not large bodies or water and is dark for a lot of the time – evolution has occured regardless of their efforts to stop it!

It is thought to have only been a rumour by Aten as it was before he was born. It had had one terrestrial fly by since it was settled and more supplies were sent to the planet before the Empires collapsed.

And then beyond the Oort cloud at the edge of our system is the Celestial Spheres – this is a space modular space station that was being set up when the Empires collapsed in the first war. It was thought that it perished but it didn’t and in fact it continued to have contact with some Elders on the surface for quiet some time, including visits too and from the Earth – it is populated by a series of almost sub-species some of whom have wings for moving via rails from one sphere to the next.

There are seven spheres but there should have been a lot more but they never were built. There is the possibility that a cluster of ships headed off out on generation ships including cryo pods in an effort to defeat the plague epidemics but no one is really sure – it appears in the records as The Ark Initiative.

The second phase is humans (the hybred slaves created by the elders/aquatic apes who are now many peoples onto themselves) – stepping out with space stations and Promethius Industries backed by Aten. They are just starting to colonise the moon and Mars. The space programs have been hampered by the collapse of the US and a general collapse of governments brought about by engineered plagues and global warming, also there was a spat of terrorism that targeted the space programmes.

Our Luna and Martian colonies end up fighting for survival on their own. The lunar one is wiped out due to hostile internal action or sabotage. The Prometheus Plateform ends up with a group of stranded people on it during the first aggression, drug, plague out break. It manages to boot strap itself with asteroids but it was touch and go.

They manage to keep contact with the surface which is rapidly flooding and/or having nasty druggy zombies resulting in everyone living on seasteds, some in cluster formation set up by the UN and some are businesses like cruise ships and have internal cultures including slave labour.

But with data from hidden archeological sites on Earth and feed back from the abandoned colonies as well as signals and communication with the celestial spheres they manage to get the space travel happening again and they frog hope across the solar system.

It’s all going a bit slowely with an asteroid at a time until they manage to put the optronic super computer together along with all the glass memory discs they have found – combined with the meat wet-ware computers and nanotech and our own computing/electronics and interfaces between the two, plus exo-skeletons and cyborgs and upload – there is a bit of a singularity including AI and planets becoming part of the computer network etc…

The third phase is the Punk now having the tech and know how and life span to head out beyond the solar system.

So roughly the human/us + aquatic apes space travel phases work like this:

1) Interplanetary – between the planets of our solar system

2) Interstellar – between the stars of our galaxy

3) Intergalactic – between galaxies in our cluster

4) Intercluster/Intersupercluster – between clusters and super clusters

5) Interversial (yes I’ve made 4 and 5 up – call them sarahisms) – between universes

There is also an issue of different AIs (artificial intellegence or robots – computers becoming sentient) as there are several techs from optronics (glass) to wetware (meat) to electronics to people themselves being elements of the calculating machine. This also leads on to the idea of there also being upload universes/worlds to explore and The Archive though only full of memories may well have been an accidental AI before the Ocean Empires collapsed ie the Tower of Babel.

And having gotten that all typed up and out of my head and therefore more concrete I should get back to writing the damn stories!

So the Punk’s world/universe has become very very complex with wars and battles and things involving four cities/countries that existed before human civilisation. There was space travel meaning there are colonies both extinct and extant, genetic engineering, alternative technologies, upload, the singularity, nanotech, aluminati secret societies and monsters old and new.

And all of it I am trying to base in a viable science and historical setting, if I can use a real fact then I will.

There are people with multiple names, offspring with the same names, cities with different names in different cultures and the same goes for gods and goddesses. A hell of a lot of characters – each with their own interactions and place within the main time line.

I need diagrams, worse I need software to generate the diagrams – I may show you some at some point but for now it is back to the writing!

The Aquatic Apes in the Punk’s Universe evolved from two sisters or close female relatives who were thrown into the sea to die. They were both pregnant and were rescued by dolphins who took them to a series of volcanic islands.

There they evolved into an aquatic sub-species with webbed hands and feet and larger heads from the fish protein and iron which greens from the sea, water assisted birth and boyancy. Some of the ones with very large heads did not leave the water.

They created their own technology using the lava and water around them, based on glass including later on optronics instead of electronics. By the time that Aten the Archetect is born there have been issues with inbreeding and his generation are already genetically altered though this is not common knowledge and there are religous movements against such things.

There were three sea empires or island cities – Atlantis, Heva and Pacifica. Each has it’s own distinct though related culture, they all have a super computer core which is backed up at Babel which is a land town and a bone of contention.

There are three to four factions within the Aquatic Ape social structure which resemble Nazi type mentalities. These continue down the ages via secret societies that actually control the human race and want to enslave, destroy or unit us/free us.

The Empires had long and interesting histories including a space programme which was far more advanced than anything we currently have. This pre-dates Aten though.

They had colonies through out the solar system and were mining the asteroids. A rogue colony was also set up on Nemises an extra solar planet that has been caught in an erratic orbit around our sun.

The Aquatic Apes are tall and look like greys/aliens, they also live far longer than us (which they genetically engineered from themselves and other homosapien sup-species that were wondering about.), they live for about 700 years naturally but also had brilliant life extension tech.

Proficient at both wetware genetics and the like they had meat computers as well as optronic (glass) super computers that could run complex models and to a certain degree of accuracy – predict the future.

They are behind all the secret societies and great civilizations through out human history.

They also had pumice/rock ships and the beginnings of upload technology as well as the beginnings of artificial intelligence. Combined with their slave/child race a singularity and interstella travel may yet happen.

After the First Empire War Aten meets a geneticist with whom he forms a relationship, together as a crowd control measure they create a series of under water cities, or at least that was the plan.

Marianus

Oceanus

Aquirianus

But they only managed to create Marianus before plague and infertility issues begin to affect all three empires. Tiamat his partner created a special race of slaves from the three landape subspecies of homosapien and themselves (another homosapien subspecies) inorder to have a race of slaves that could cope with being surrounded by water – an issue they had had.

It quickly becomes apparent that the new land/aquatic apes are much better than the other slaves and are harnessed by the Empires as their own population crashes due to environmental pollution and inbreeding.

The city is designed to be self sufficient but is not quiet finished when plague strikes and kills the daughter Aten and Taimat have. In her anguish, Tiamat comes up with the placenta trees as the years roll by and it becomes obvious that having another natural child is just not going to happen. The placenta trees where designed for her hybrid slaves and she realises they do not have much time so she hacks her existing technology but it means there is a high failure rate.

She creates her and Aten’s son Morlock, as he grows up she becomes more and more desperate to have her daughter back, as does Aten. They both become obsessed with the long term survival issues and the purity of the race but in different ways.

A skism of the Empires occurs and Taimat goes home leaving Aten with Morklock who is a sociopath. Aten continues to try and send supplies to the under water city but get embroiled in various schemes to save his people including making sure that the empires continue to speak enough that the forth optronic core at Babel is allowed to take back ups of their systems.

One Empire becomes increasingly more seperatist but due to Tiamat, Aten keeps a vague connection and manages to organise a life saving genetic manipulation within it so that they do not all die from plague. But Tiamat is becoming steadily more believing of the dogma surrounding her.

Aten is becoming more obsessed with making sure there is actually a life eternal here on Earth. He realises that the Empires are heading for another war – one he fears they will not survive so he arranges for the Tower of Babel (a super computer) to be dismanteled and sent down to Marianus. With plans of building another one, which get underway straight away.

The three ocean empires are destroyed in a second Empire War and Aten looses contact with the under water city and thinks it’s destroyed. Tiamat has engineered this but has her own issues to deal with and thinks that it is also lost.

So the city has been left at the edge of survival for millenia, but knowledge of it still exists and so every now and then explorers head out to find it and often meet with a sticky end but not always.

This means that new blood goes in and old knowledge leaks out. It has ended up covered in a thick layer of foram ooze and looks like a creater or large sump hole type structure. There are versions and distortions of the placenta trees and wetware super computers which are great ancient tentical creatures that can jack into your brain.

The people know of the outside world and wish to remain safe so can be heavy handed with intruders.

I have been taking part in NaNoWriMo this month – as I have done every year since 2009 (infact 2008 though that was unofficial and I only wrote about 5K – it was also not based in the Punk’s world but did lay the foundation for doing a large epic that would span multiple Nano’s).

The idea is that you write 50, 000 words in a month, something I have already achieved this year but I realised I have not actually told you about this years novel!

It is called Babel’s Key and is about a couple of game designers who find that their research into H.P. Lovecraft a gothic fantasy author of the previous century, has placed themselves and their families into peril.

They end up plunged into a world beneath the one they know both physically and metaphorically with secret societies and ancient technologies. Resulting in a quest to find Lovecraft’s city beneath the ocean complete with tenitcal monsters.

The main protagonists are Sam and Mack who are a couple with kids, they want to be game designers but it has to fit in part time around their jobs. Working with an equally obsessed friend they have already spent a decade trying to construct their game world.

The city under the waves is for story purposes called Marinanus or at least that is the translation into English from the silibantly hiss language of the natives. There will be many blog posts and short stories about the place coming 🙂

I am currently only 30 k words in and I currently do not actually know how long this tail wants to be nor if the title will stay or be part of a series. As always with my long form writing (can you tell I’ve recently done a communication/journalism course?) it is edging towards wanting to be a series. The title itself refers to something hidden in the city which at this rate will not have enough words to appear in the novel.

Anyway I’d better get back to writing it!