singularityblues.com

Original Caracter MEME:
FRAN SERVICE:
1) How you thought of their name

It’s a take off on “Fan Service”.  Of which there has not been enough, I’ll admit.

2) What made you create the character in the first place

I wanted to create a site with an “I Love Lucy” vibe.  She’s an amalgam of Mae West, Lucille Ball, and Bette Midler

3) How the character has changed over time (if they have changed)

Fran has changed very little.  Like Athena, she has popped full figured (so to speak) out of my skull.

4) Any random fun fact about that character

She is NOT wearing eye glasses.  Those are long range sensors:  acoustic (sonar), visual (“eyes”), and high energy (radar).

Dual update coming up. Can you feel the excitement? I seem to have a little more time to screw around with this side project of late, so I figured I would try to get the Shield of Creation prologs nailed down before the day of the Big Move arrived.

Without giving too much away, it’s all over but for the shouting in the Terra Bella path. There is, however, still some exposition left in the Singularity Rosette path, so stay tuned.

An apology for those of you who follow Shield of Creation. I had a burst of creativity over lunch last week, and this whole micro-arc got written involving the copies of Miranda and Luna “waking up”.

The problem is that this is not the “good parts”. I’ve been trying to wrap Shield of Creation up for a damn year now, and I am not going to slow things down just to include this.

So I’m going to have my cake and eat it, too.

Next week will have the result of the micro-arc. You don’t need to know what happens in it to appreciate the results.

On the other hand, the events of the micro arc will set the tone for the relationship between the Doppelgangers and their Oracle for Hire counterparts.

Two things to know about Doppels (or instantiations, as they prefer to call themselves): they know they’re not the original. This doesn’t really bother them. That’s why they choose new names. They would never, ever hurt their Enfranchiser. On the other hand, if a Doppel is incomplete, and they have access to the Enfranchiser, they are within their rights to complete the copy. In fact, they will be compelled to do this. In many ways, it’s worse than the sex drive.

You can see how much fun this is going to be…

Or: why a Magickal world (in my parliance, a High Energy Low Probability — HELP — world) will never develop science.

You see, it all started out with trying to pick which technological niche the Dominic Deegan world occupied. The good people at Orion’s Arm have given me one, kinda sorta: clarktech (or femtotech). “Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic”. Or vice versa. The Oracle for Hire universe has femtotech. Which is to say, the adepts there (the “mages”) are able to manipulate their environment at the femtometer level. Which is to say, at the sub-Heisenberg level.

In Plain English: they can do shit that’s, well, MAGIC! It confounds and denies what we perceive to be The Laws of Nature.

At first I figured that since they had femtotech, they would be working their way back to “our” technology, but slowly. After all, if you have magic, why do you need chemistry, mechanics, or physics?

Then it hit me: science, as we know it here, is almost impossible for them. In our universe (and the Singularity Blues universe) there is no such thing as “mind” over matter, no telekinesis, . When we observe something, we usually observe the “thing as such”.

So.

Some important things necessary for the scientific method to be discovered is intellectual integrity and peer review. Intellectual integrity is going to be a challenge in a magical world because the observer will be able to affect the outcome, consciously or unconsciously. This is important, because if you can change the nature of reality around you, even for a moment, you can throw what we laughingly call “causality” right out the window. How could you know, how could you even check, if you inadvertently gimmicked the outcome of an observation?

And if you can influence other people’s minds, well, forget peer review. “This is the result you were looking for (Jedi wave of the hand)”.

So where in the hell am I going with this? I’m making the following point: The technology of the Singularity Blues universe is going to be baffling to the Oracle for Hire people, and vice versa: Miranda will be suspicious of all the “Luddite” goings on at Casa Bernard, and Fran will just plain hate Magic.

Let the hilarity begin!