Fourth Wall Banger

James Brown examined the decision tree for the next "Honor Guard" story arc one more time. He did not like what he saw.

It was produced by the program SIMPLOT, an application used for a huge number of tasks -- managing risky investments, planning complex projects with potential contingencies, preparing threat analysis trees for distributed systems, or scripting interactive fiction with semi-autonomous actors. The program presented complex processes as a directed acyclic graph, and suggested new branches and nodes based on inferences from a domain-specific knowledge base using a simple, sub-sapient breadth-first autonomous cutting inference engine*.

His collaborator, Judas Montclair, had a bad habit of pruning interesting nodes from his decision trees. Not long ago, Judas had failed to account for the possibility that the Reyll heretic Demonslayer and her team of miscreants, M-Seven, would be able to mount an attack on the Corporate HQ, Sedgewick Station.

That mistake cost Judas two weeks of interrogation at the hands of Corporate intelligence.

He returned a shadow of his usual hedonistic self, a distracted nervous wreck who seemed to lose himself in terrible daydreams. James had done his best to cover for Judas, but James' work was itself time-consuming and exhausting -- he had to choose from and mix together streams from a plethora of recording devices into a visual narrative that would make sense to and hold the attention of a distracted, not terribly sober audience.

James had been doing his best to pick up the slack as Judas recovered. The decision trees Montclair was producing had become dangerously sparse, and James would sometimes go through them and add nodes to represent other possible chains of cause and effect, possibilities that Judas had precluded in the plans and projections that would influence the next several months of "Honor Guard" vids.

Some of this was a question of style. Judas liked letting the characters drive the story, and that often meant leaving them a great deal of autonomy. The result of these scripts were broad trees with few nodes and many branches. The fans seemed to like these free-wheeling plots, and giving the talent more freedom made "Honor Guard" feel relatively authentic.

The coming story was completely different. It was a graph like a map to a rail line, a straight path from plot point to plot point. Worse still, a number of the nodes were encrypted, and Jack couldn't even open them to suggest alternative story-lines. Poking through the meta-data for the nodes, Jack saw that they were asymmetrically encrypted with a public key used by the Grays, Corporate military intelligence.

The parts he could read worried him. Judas was making a dangerous series of assumptions, and the involvement with the Grays made Jack nervous. Jack had tried repeatedly to arrange meetings with his colleague, but Judas had always put him off.

Jack's communicator beeped. It was Judas. Jack was finally getting his chance to share his misgivings with Judas.

Judas' voice was slurred, and Jack could hear blaring pop music in the background. They arranged to meet at a nearby bar.

Jack took public transportation to the run down drinking establishment. Judas had obviously been drinking heavily, and sitting in a semi-private booth off to the side of the dark bar.

Jack sat down next to him with a tablet computer. "Judas, are you sure you're up to this?"

"Oh yes. Hell yes."

"I can't evaluate a lot of the nodes on this next script--"

"Not your concern, my boy. It's out of our hands."

"Judas, listen to me -- if you miss a possibility like last time, they'll take you in again. I need you in good shape if we're going to stay on schedule."

Judas did not listen to Jack. He thought about being taken in again, the woman doctor in her tight leather suit -- her huge quartet of breasts (surely implants) heaving as she applied the neural stimulator and Judas arched his back in pain -- and he had a sudden, adolescent flush of shame as he wondered if his colleague could see his erection.

"Judas? You've been spacing out like that a lot recently."

"Sorry." Judas pushed away from Jack and crossed his legs, resting his left foot on his right knee.

"I need you to look at this." Jack gestured towards the tablet with its stylus. "If I add a branch here, the graph won't terminate where we planned--"

Judas blinked his eyes, and slowly read the branch in tree. "Oh, no. She'll never do that. Being a super-heroine is much too important to her. She'd never risk it."

"Are you sure? If they talk, there's a non-zero probability that they'll never reach the nodes down here." Jack gestured at the encrypted nodes. "If they use a genetic screening to identify--"

"Don't be silly, Jack."

"Judas, I know what her mother was. If she goes after her father, the whole project is in danger--"

"Please, Jack. She likes being in charge too much. She'd never risk it."

Jack shook his head in exasperation. He wasn't getting through to Judas, and it frustrated him. "This script is a lot more linear than what I'm used to from you. What's going to happen?"

Judas smiled. "We're going to win, Jack. It's that simple."

Jack was annoyed enough that he left Judas behind to the throbbing music and went home.

Jack wished that he had felt like drinking with his colleague. He was going to have trouble getting to sleep tonight.

* Imagine a "mind mapping" package melded with a slightly cleverer version of Prolog. SIMPLOT is about as ubiquitous in the Corporation as Microsoft Excel in a modern computerized office on Earth.

Elsewhere

The mining town was in ruins. Fires burned on both sides of the main drag of the prefabricated shopping mall perched in a crater of a larger than average asteroid. Above them, the net-like satellite in synchronous orbit that confined the town's artificial gravity field glinted in the faint sun-light.

A massive figure grinned and cracked his knuckles as he bore down on Thresher. The cyborg stood his ground.

With a well-practiced movement, Thresher fired a tether at Leviathan.

On board the Nightstalker, the Eye was startled by a premonition. "Jolt? I'm gonna throttle up the engines. Now!"

"Everybody to stations! Here we go!" Jolt gripped the arms of the command chair.

Leviathan's arms were bound to his sides. He grabbed the trailing end of the tether daintily, looked at it, and began to laugh. Thresher fired the other end of the tether at a cable lying on the ground behind him.

Leviathan advanced -- and the cable suddenly pulled taut as the Nightstalker streaked overhead. His vast bulk was jerked off the surface of the asteroid into the vacuum of space.

Thresher waved as Leviathan disappeared in the black distance. He triggered his comm implants. "Any chance you can take me with you? I wanna see this."

A fraction of a second later, the cyborg hero dematerialized. Townspeople crawled from the rubble and set to work putting out the fires consuming precious oxygen.

The Nightstalker keel-hauled Leviathan far away from the mining colony.

Thresher entered the bridge, and say Leviathan's scowling face on the main monitors. "Reporting for duty, Captain."

"Take your station, Thresher." Jolt leaned back into the command chair. "We're about to release the tow line and throw him into the sun."

Victor looked up from the sensor console. "Captain? Asteroid 423 has just left its orbit. It's approaching our position at relativistic speed-"

Jolt smiled. "I'm picking up Arsenal's implants on the comms board. Looks like he remembered them this time."

The Eye looked up from her navigation console. "You're kidding me! Leviathan punched his head clean off!"

Jolt looked tense. "Come on guys. Enough distractions -- let's get turned around and send Lynnie on a vector into the sun."

The Eye laid in the new course, and the Nightstalker swung around on a course approaching the sun. On the big screen, Leviathan grimaced, and spat out two silent words into the vacuum of space.

Jolt thought for a moment. "What did he say? 'SCREW PHYSICS?'"

The Eye remarked, "I don't think that was 'screw'..."

Lights flickered as Leviathan relaxed the screen that protected normal space from his enormous gravitational field. The bridge of the star-ship shook.

Victor looked up from the engineering console. "Ma'am... hyperdrive is down. We're stuck on a course into the sun."

Jolt gritted her teeth. "Cut the damned tether. Try to get us some distance--"

"But that won't help us--" Victor stopped talking as Asteroid 423 loomed into the field of view. "Whoa."

The kilometer-wide rock slammed into Leviathan. The Nightstalker shuddered as his gravitational field fluctuated.

"Get that on screen!"

"Yes, ma'am!" Victor's fingers raced over his engineering console. "I think I have it--"

Leviathan lay face down in an impact crater on the surface of the asteroid. He picked himself up and dusted himself off.

A streak appeared over the truncated horizon, and set down just outside the crater. Two beams struck Leviathan in the chest, and the massive Fe Arran reeled as the two bolts lit up finger-tip sized patches on his invulnerable chest.

Arsenal's voice came in on the comms. "What's my output?"

Victor examined the sensor readouts. "You're at 2 megatons yield apiece. That won't--"

"Get ready for an emergency jump. I'm gonna tighten the focus and cross beams."

Victor's jaw dropped. He recovered in less than a second. "On it."

Leviathan bore down on Arsenal's position as the beams narrowed and slowly approached each other.

"What's he--"

"No time."

The beams touched. The energy flux in at the intersection point exceeded the Planck energy by several orders of magnitude, and space and time began to violently expand from the impact point.

As the Nightstalker dematerialized, a violent gravity wave disintegrated Asteroid 423.

The star-ship rematerialized not far from where it tried to escape the destruction.

"What just happened--"

"Just a minute, Ma'am."

"Did he just--"

"I have his signal."

"What!?"

Arsenal appeared on the screen, towing Leviathan's unconscious form from the turmoil of boulders converging on the former center of mass of Asteroid 423.

"He exceeded the maximum energy flux for a unit of space. Space-time exploded in Leviathan's face."

"Open the cargo bay doors." Jolt rubbed her forehead as she watched Arsenal drag the unconscious Leviathan towards the Nightstalker.

A moment later, Honor Guard gathered to watch as Arsenal dragged Leviathan into the hold.

"You- you did it. You knocked him out."

"Ma'am." Arsenal addressed Jolt. "I need to go back to the colony."

Jolt nodded. "I understand."

A few moments later, Arsenal touched down just outside the perimeter of a field hospital hastily erected to deal with the casualties of Leviathan's mindless rampage. He pushed through doctors and nurses, and headed towards a tent that had been turned into a field hospital.

Soon he found the one he was looking for.

"Come with me. You're not safe here."

Jinx looked up at him, holding a bundle of sterilizing gauze in her arms. "Give me a minute. These people need my help."

He smiled and nodded. "All right. What can I do?"