Just blogged about this on the main blog so I needed to create a note here. After writing my recent sci-fi novella, I realized it was fairly good, but there was one main problem. The characters for the most part were clean cut and nice, good people on a clean ship. I need something dark, both in setting and character. A dark, dirty world of browns and blacks, dirty machinery, rain pouring down. Ugly implants jutting out of people’s shaved heads. An oppressive government controlled by corporations and the rich. A loss of humanity.
Amongst all this is a protagonist. I think I’ll go with a female this time around. She’s not a perfect princess though. Addiction. To something technology related? A buzzhead (addicted to small electric shocks tied to electrodes sitting in the pleasure centers of the brain)…no, too trite and overused. She uses information as a shield, a blanket. She can’t stop herself from getting more news and data from the feeds coming in. Most likely her profession is a private eye, a cop, a reporter, something like that. Though she continues to feel more alone by the day as the people around her are solitary and ignore real world passers-by as they jack in more, she feels more and more connected to those she knows on the net as she herself becomes increasingly isolated as she jacks in more frequently.
She’ll need to face her dependence on this technology at some point. Someone will challenge her on it, a possible love interest. Someone who’s not connected in to the network. She’s scared of him and looks down upon him.
She’s hired to identify a group of zeros, those who are so unconnected that they are virtually unknown to the net, the government and corporations. They can’t be tracked, monitored or controlled. She usually doesn’t ask about her jobs so she just starts to do her job, slowly falling in love unbeknownst to her with one of them. Eventually she realizes she is identifying them so they can be offed (or forcefully jacked into the net?) by the government and big corporations.
Once every zero is dead or jacked in, anything the net believes the people will believe, so to speak. The government and corporations have big plans, all in the name of profits and security. But this girl and her new friend who she’s strangely decided to help hide and save his life are on to the evil plans. They eventually manage to break in and unleash a nasty virus on the populace that screws up a number of major government watchdog and corporate ‘customer identification’ systems.
In the end, she leaves the big city behind to live with her love on a large piece of property. She still keeps a net-connected computer hidden behind firewalls and anonymous accounts to stay vigilant of the greater world, but she learns to appreciate her humanity and nature around her. She helps her lover’s community of city and tech-phobics come to accept and understand technology for its beneficial uses.
This would speak finally to a message I’ve identified with. Many novels I read manage to get a message out and I’ve never been able to do it. Technology is good, but in the wrong hands it can go to far to disconnect people, as well as government and corporations are necessary but again should be kept in check.
While the ending would be ligher, I want to keep the bulk of it fairly dark. Industrial cities, smog, constant rain from an ecologically messed up weather system. Corporations more powerful than the government, and agencies unethically using data to identify and track anyone, anywhere. Men in black chasing them in hovercars through a smog-filled landscape, escaping in the ghettoed, burnt out skyscrapers of times long past. Weird freaks with tattoos, piercings, dyed hair, implants and other cyber modifications out the wazzoo who they must turn to for help in getting information and in hiding.
Our character, again, must not be perfect. The reader should identify with her and feel she’s good, but also be hooked on her roughness, her hard luck attitudes as she ignores less-fortunate that she doesn’t have time to help.
I’m thinking one early scene should be her turning in some misfortunate because she’s bought into the whole scheme: they weren’t jacked in so they couldn’t get immediate help for their sick child on the net which amounts to mistreatment so the government takes away their kids and jacks them in. The mother would cry out about how she didn’t want her kids to become net zombies, mindless adherents to the popular opinion as it washed over the net. She did everything she could for the sick child that died. Just because she didn’t have a net connection made her unfit?