Buck turned the dial to 1997 and activated the remote control for his time travel device.
*****
E-Taco and a younger, marginally fitter Buck were in E-Taco’s garage jamming together for the first time. Buck was playing an Ernie Ball Music Man Stingray 4-banger. Natural wood finish, black oval pick guard. The birds-eye maple neck was amazing. The bass was obtained in the days before Ernie Ball stopped using quality materials. Buck wouldn’t play a new Stingray even if they paid him. Well, maybe if they paid him, but it would have to be for a hefty sum, and people would have to know he’d been paid, because he wouldn’t want people to think he’d chosen such an instrument as his preference, but Buck digests. The one he was playing on that fateful day in 1997 was a classic.
Unfortunately, he was playing it through a disaster of an amp: the remnants of a Peavey Combo 300. It had been a decent amp when brand new. Serviceable, effective, but without much character. In his youthful exuberance, however, Buck has made it worse. He had taken it apart and tried to turn the combo into a separate head and speaker cabinet. Having no knowledge whatsoever about what makes for a quality cabinet, the sound was awful. The reason he had attempted this abortion of engineering in the first place was because he desired to play the amp through a 4x10 cabinet without the 15” speaker that was built into the original combo. Ironically, on that day, he was not using the 4x10 cab at all, and was stuck with the 15” speaker, which was blown, in its homemade cabinet.
E-Taco had just finished walking Buck through the chords to the Cars’ “Just What I Needed” when they were interrupted by a bright flash and a puff of smoke. Out of the smoke stepped an older, fatter, lumbering version of Buck 99, circa 2009. He stepped over some guitar cords toward young Buck, reached out his hands, nodded toward the Stingray, and said, “May I?”
Young Buck recognized who he was looking at and, thinking he was about to experience a revelation about where his own music skills would one day be, he gladly handed over the bass guitar to his future self’s hands.
“Thank you,” said the elder Buck, grinning. “You can keep the amp.”
Before young Buck could respond, future Buck hit a button on his remote and disappeared in another bright flash and a puff, leaving a heavy stench of ozone to assault their nostrils, and no means by which they could produce notes in the lower registers.
*****
“Back,” said Buck, plugging the Stingray into his Ampeg SVT.
“Did you pick up my silver Dan Electro while you were there?” asked today’s E-Taco.
“You mean the one with the lipstick pick-ups that M used to play?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Return of the Drone
“Suddenly, with a single keystroke, Buck 99 was actively writing again,” typed Buck on his MacBook Pro, his words appearing on an enormous 24” flat screen monitor for all to see. “It had been over two years since he’d flirted with disaster like this, tempting fate to strip him of gainful employment. For two years he had played it cool, kept his nose to the grindstone, working smarter, not harder, while his writing skills deteriorated, his dreams of becoming a successful writer dying a little bit each day. He would die no more.”
“We shall see,” retorted his evil nemesis, the little doubting voice inside his head, with a touch of maniacal glee. He’d heard it all before and was well versed in Buck’s broken promises. “We shall see...”
“We shall see,” retorted his evil nemesis, the little doubting voice inside his head, with a touch of maniacal glee. He’d heard it all before and was well versed in Buck’s broken promises. “We shall see...”
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Buck Tough, Body Not
Buck loved his new job coding Java web services, except for the part where he was hunched over his computer keyboard more than ever before. He didn't know which was worse:
(A) Enduring chronic back pain caused by muscle tension stemming from work-related stress associated with dealing with back-stabbing office politicos, a schedule packed with meetings designed to limit the time one had to actually accomplish any work, and other miscellaneous bureaucratic nonsense; or
(B) Enduring even worse chronic back pain caused by muscle tension resulting from bad posture associated with being hunched over a computer keyboard all day doing work he enjoyed.
With option (B), the day seem to pass much more quickly and there were actual moments of contentment, but the after-effects were nasty.
So Buck decided to double his efforts to stay in shape, hoping it would keep his body lean, mean, and most of all, flexible. To this end he played 5-on-5 basketball on Monday and Wednesday evenings with a bunch of guys from around the neighborhood.
To date the net effect of playing basketball has been negative bordering on catastrophic. Eight weeks ago he ran into one dude's shoulder and bloodied his nose, a collision described by one onlooker as "spectacular" ("Your glasses spun off like a whirly-bird," said one guy), and although the nose wasn't broken he did manage to bruise the soft palate between the roof of his mouth and his nasal cavity. This rendered him unable to brush his teeth or blow his nose for the next month, at least not without uttering loud obscenities within earshot of his children. He stopped the bleeding and got up to play some more that game but found that most of the guys had fled the scene and the game was over. Buck was just glad he still had all his teeth, because that was his first thought after the collision: he was certain some teeth were gone or broken.
Buck resisted returning to the courts for about two weeks after that in a vain attempt to recover from a freshly aggravated case of plantar fasciitis that was making him limp. Finally he hit the courts again, only to be bombarded by a series of meetings, family events, birthdays, and assorted reptile situations that kept him off the courts for a few more weeks. Then, before he made his triumphant return, he hit the weights and did some cardio work with an emphasis on muscular endurance in his calf and shoulder muscles to help his hoops performance. He also took to the courts to practice shooting, and he added some wind-sprint lay-up drills. It all paid off.
Buck hit the courts with a vengeance, and for once he actually played well. Please understand that Buck isn't terribly tall or stout, and as he approaches middle age he is losing a step. Basketball is not exactly his game, and improvement is not likely. He grew up playing tennis, but that makes his back feel terrible (because he has trouble adjusting his game to the realities of aging), whereas for some reason basketball does not. But Buck digresses: for the first time in his life on the basketball court, excluding all the times he played against kids half his size, Buck 99 was The Man.
Buck's performance started with a steal and a quick lay-up. Then one of his teammates found him streaking through the lane, fed him a quick bounce pass, and Buck scored the lay-up in heavy traffic. Buck returned the favor with an offensive board and an overhand outlet pass that the same teammate caught over the back in stride for a lay-up of his own. Three more times the teammate fed the ball to Buck in the paint, and although Buck was surrounded by trees he kept penetrating through to the light. Another steal convinced the opponents that dribbling the ball in his vicinity was a bad idea. As the games progressed and teams were switched up, he found himself opposite the one former teammate with whom he was connecting so well, and who had a good 6" height advantage on Buck. Buck got another steal and ran down the court, but the guy was athletic and got back in plenty of time to defend against him. It was 1-on-1 with no hope for Buck. His new teammates called for him to hold it up, and for a moment he acted as though he might, but instead he went into a dazzling array of moves including but not limited to behind-the-back and under-the-leg dribbling, a stop, a fake shot or two, a few pivots, and a fake pass, when suddenly he realized that his stunts had miraculously worked and the hoop was wide open at point-blank range. A few minutes later he concluded his heroics with an outside, turnaround fadeaway jumper to his weak side under heavy defensive pressure that somehow went in. It was magic. It was also pure garbage, but magic garbage nonetheless.
As the evening ended the guys complimented Buck, saying that he was the clear MVP for the day. Four games and he'd been on the winning team each time. He went home that night proud of his accomplishments and eager for more. There was only one thing wrong:
He had broken his finger halfway through the first game.
That was three weeks ago. The finger did not feel well, and it has become clear that the finger will never fully recover (if anything, it has gotten worse). He played again for the first time on Monday, taping the fingers on his left hand to avoid making the injury worse. This worked, but it affected all aspects of his game. He went 1 for about 20 from the field (making only a lay-up that a teammate had missed on a 2-on-1 situation), missed a bunch of easy lay-ups, threw up air balls from outside, and turned the ball over to opponents with ill-conceived and poorly executed passes. Whenever he touched the ball his opponents pretended to be his teammates and encouraged him to shoot.
Buck doesn't want to talk about basketball anymore.
(A) Enduring chronic back pain caused by muscle tension stemming from work-related stress associated with dealing with back-stabbing office politicos, a schedule packed with meetings designed to limit the time one had to actually accomplish any work, and other miscellaneous bureaucratic nonsense; or
(B) Enduring even worse chronic back pain caused by muscle tension resulting from bad posture associated with being hunched over a computer keyboard all day doing work he enjoyed.
With option (B), the day seem to pass much more quickly and there were actual moments of contentment, but the after-effects were nasty.
So Buck decided to double his efforts to stay in shape, hoping it would keep his body lean, mean, and most of all, flexible. To this end he played 5-on-5 basketball on Monday and Wednesday evenings with a bunch of guys from around the neighborhood.
To date the net effect of playing basketball has been negative bordering on catastrophic. Eight weeks ago he ran into one dude's shoulder and bloodied his nose, a collision described by one onlooker as "spectacular" ("Your glasses spun off like a whirly-bird," said one guy), and although the nose wasn't broken he did manage to bruise the soft palate between the roof of his mouth and his nasal cavity. This rendered him unable to brush his teeth or blow his nose for the next month, at least not without uttering loud obscenities within earshot of his children. He stopped the bleeding and got up to play some more that game but found that most of the guys had fled the scene and the game was over. Buck was just glad he still had all his teeth, because that was his first thought after the collision: he was certain some teeth were gone or broken.
Buck resisted returning to the courts for about two weeks after that in a vain attempt to recover from a freshly aggravated case of plantar fasciitis that was making him limp. Finally he hit the courts again, only to be bombarded by a series of meetings, family events, birthdays, and assorted reptile situations that kept him off the courts for a few more weeks. Then, before he made his triumphant return, he hit the weights and did some cardio work with an emphasis on muscular endurance in his calf and shoulder muscles to help his hoops performance. He also took to the courts to practice shooting, and he added some wind-sprint lay-up drills. It all paid off.
Buck hit the courts with a vengeance, and for once he actually played well. Please understand that Buck isn't terribly tall or stout, and as he approaches middle age he is losing a step. Basketball is not exactly his game, and improvement is not likely. He grew up playing tennis, but that makes his back feel terrible (because he has trouble adjusting his game to the realities of aging), whereas for some reason basketball does not. But Buck digresses: for the first time in his life on the basketball court, excluding all the times he played against kids half his size, Buck 99 was The Man.
Buck's performance started with a steal and a quick lay-up. Then one of his teammates found him streaking through the lane, fed him a quick bounce pass, and Buck scored the lay-up in heavy traffic. Buck returned the favor with an offensive board and an overhand outlet pass that the same teammate caught over the back in stride for a lay-up of his own. Three more times the teammate fed the ball to Buck in the paint, and although Buck was surrounded by trees he kept penetrating through to the light. Another steal convinced the opponents that dribbling the ball in his vicinity was a bad idea. As the games progressed and teams were switched up, he found himself opposite the one former teammate with whom he was connecting so well, and who had a good 6" height advantage on Buck. Buck got another steal and ran down the court, but the guy was athletic and got back in plenty of time to defend against him. It was 1-on-1 with no hope for Buck. His new teammates called for him to hold it up, and for a moment he acted as though he might, but instead he went into a dazzling array of moves including but not limited to behind-the-back and under-the-leg dribbling, a stop, a fake shot or two, a few pivots, and a fake pass, when suddenly he realized that his stunts had miraculously worked and the hoop was wide open at point-blank range. A few minutes later he concluded his heroics with an outside, turnaround fadeaway jumper to his weak side under heavy defensive pressure that somehow went in. It was magic. It was also pure garbage, but magic garbage nonetheless.
As the evening ended the guys complimented Buck, saying that he was the clear MVP for the day. Four games and he'd been on the winning team each time. He went home that night proud of his accomplishments and eager for more. There was only one thing wrong:
He had broken his finger halfway through the first game.
That was three weeks ago. The finger did not feel well, and it has become clear that the finger will never fully recover (if anything, it has gotten worse). He played again for the first time on Monday, taping the fingers on his left hand to avoid making the injury worse. This worked, but it affected all aspects of his game. He went 1 for about 20 from the field (making only a lay-up that a teammate had missed on a 2-on-1 situation), missed a bunch of easy lay-ups, threw up air balls from outside, and turned the ball over to opponents with ill-conceived and poorly executed passes. Whenever he touched the ball his opponents pretended to be his teammates and encouraged him to shoot.
Buck doesn't want to talk about basketball anymore.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
The 12
Buck understands that if you want to be a writer, sometimes you just have to start writing even if you have nothing to say.
Take today, for example. Buck doesn't have squat to say, but if you're reading this, then he's already taken up a few moments of your precious time for nothing. Are you entertained? Do you find this intriguing, or even mildly interesting? Doubtfully. So if you don't want your day to be a total loss, it is in your best interest to read no further.
You have been warned.
******************
"To provide some context for Buck's situation and the epic struggle he was about to face," typed Buck shortly after conquering a programming bug at work that had been bothering him since the previous day, "it is convenient to introduce a new term to represent a time scale that 21st century readers weren't aware of prior to its discovery in their future. The unit of time is called the g-pon*, equivalent to the average lifespan of known universes. A g-pon is roughly equal to 32.71552 x googol-plex Earth years, based on the precise duration of an Earth year on January 1st of the year 2237. When g-pon is used in the plural sense, it sometimes takes on a slightly different meaning, referring to an instance of a specific universe that occured sequentially prior to our own (see entire footnote below). For example: the phrase 'three g-pons ago' would indicate any time within the lifetime of a universe Alpha-3, which ran its full life cycle before our current universe (Alpha-0) began, and also indicates that two other universes (Alpha-2 and Alpha-1, in that order) ran their full life cycles before our universe began its first iteration.
Buck decided not to go into a universe's iterative properties. Some things were better left unknown.
"Anyway, eleven g-pons ago, an intelligent entity capitalized on the dark matter energy transfer betwixt universes to translate himself from one universe to the next in an effort to elude his enemies. This intelligent entity was the last of his kind, and in fact wasn't truly alive in any conventional sense at the time of his escape. Technology had enabled him to preserve his memories and thought patterns in a device which resembled a small orb, even as the horde of evil beings which had wiped his own race out of existence had brought death to his physical form. It was all part of a carefully orchestrated plan which required him to penetrate to the heart of the enemy home world. When he allowed himself to be captured and executed, his memories transferred to the orb which was hidden on that world. The orb served a dual purpose: not only did it contain the elements of his identity, but also it was a vessel devised to slip into the dark energy nodestream moments after its initialization. Slipping such an object through to the next universe brought no harm to the object itself, but as he well knew, such an action was best practiced deep in the vacuum of space, far from populated worlds, due to the dark energy anti-matter after-shock event that occurred in the source universe when such an event took place. In other words, when the evil beings executed him, they doomed their own home planet and its star system, wiping out a healthy chunk of their civilization along the way and leaving the scattered remnants of their species to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened."
Buck then decided that this was a patently ridiculous literary path to follow. He wasn't about to argue that memories and thought patterns (or general disposition, brainwaves, etc.) were equivalent to the soul, which is really what he'd want a character to have. So he found himself at a place where he was hypothesizing an immortal being (more like an "identity") who more or less latches onto the bodies and souls of those who happen upon the vessel. In other words, these beings who find the vessel remain true to themselves and their general nature, but they absorb his experiences and ways of thinking, along with those of anyone else who found the orb along the way. This goes on for several g-pons, of course, which brings him into the current universe where the orb manages to slip into a black hole, the same black hole, in fact, where Buck's ship is being smashed into plasma.
Does Buck obtain the orb and the memories of trillions of beings who have shared the immortal entity's life across the universes and use the knowledge contained therein to escape the fate of which he isn't even aware? Is it what makes him aware of his true, external circumstances? Or is some other character in Buck's life the keeper of the orb? How did the sinister beings track the orb down across the cosmos in their effort to seek revenge for the destruction of their civilization? Is the intelligence mentioned in last week's post behind the black racer snake's eyes one of these aliens out for the entity's destruction? Are these the same evil beings who were Will anyone really give a rat's ass?
How does dark energy create an explosion of any magnitude when it's really thought to be nothing more than the residual negative energy of empty space, containing an almost unimaginably low quantity of energy per cubic centimeter? You see, Buck actually went and looked this stuff up a few days after drafting the premise above. It turns out that dark energy accounts for something like 74% of the universe's mass, but it's homogeneous, spread out equally in little tiny portions throughout the void between the planets, stars, galaxies, clouds, clusters, and all the other stuff that's out there, a good 20% of which is called "dark matter," a blanket term used to refer to a whole class of invisible objects which scientists are pretty sure is out there (one example is dead stars which no longer produce light). So anyone who reads Buck's account of the dark energy anti-matter explosion is going to think, "Huh?" Buck doesn't want that: he's hardcore. He wants his science fiction to be possible.
So he decided, at least for the time being, to abandon this possible thread of fiction on his blog, but he did chose to go ahead and publish this entry. If for no other reason it's because he liked the footnote that he wrote below. Meanwhile, all that was left to do was explain the title, "The 12." At the end of each universe, or when the time is right, the entity creates another orb, and sends it and all the previous orbs through to the next universe. This is to propagate the new life form he has essentially created via the use of this technology. So there wasn't going to be just one entity, but in Buck's time, twelve (with eleven orbs, the orb for the current universe not yet created). The experiences and memories associated with each are wildly different, and of course each can come into the possession of any manner of intelligent being, so that equates to twelve bad-asses running around the universe alternately wreaking havoc, playing hero, or just plain wandering.
Of course, this too was full of holes, since the number of orbs could grow exponentially, since each possessor could make a copy and send it through. Buck considered that maybe there was some logical rule enforced that required all orbs to be brought together for another to be created. This would force the beings who possessed the orbs to seek out the others, possibly fighting for control of all of them. Naturally this reeks of being like the standard "Highlander" premise, unless Buck writes it more as a cooperative venture, which would allow for the revenge-seeking aliens to play a more serious role as potential spoilers of the original entity's grand plan.
Maybe Buck will take up this idea again one day, but what he really feels is missing is the human element, and how to make the reader give a flying fuck about the original entity and his mission. That, and what to call the bad beings. The right name for that species could make or break it...and what makes them special? What separates them from the orcs of the literary world?
"Cheers, oh faithful reader," writes Buck as he returns to work.
* Footnote: From the Encyclopedia Galactica, ST 3260: g-pon is pronounced /jē'- pŏn/, or alternatively, /jə - pŏn'/. Etymology: A form of snigglet combining the terms "googol-plex" (10 to the 10th to the 100th power) and "eon", an ambiguous measure of geologic time. The term was coined by Buck 99 in the 25th century but discovered by 21st century readers via a web log ("blog") that he somehow published on an actual, real-world blog on 21st century Earth's primitive Internet network from a nearly identical network located within a fictitious LifeNet© simulation context aboard a private spacecraft accelerating into a black hole's gravity well. How he managed to pull this off is a matter of continued speculation and arguably the most brilliant technological feat in the history of the human race. It is conjectured that he used the black-hole's x-ray emissions as the means to transmit the data, but how he mastered an understanding of singularities and their effect on time to deliver a message to 21st century Earth, and how he managed to ensure that a mechanism existed in the real world of 21st century Earth to receive the transmission and upload it automatically to the necessary network servers, remain enigmas that defy mortal comprehension.
The term itself did not come into widespread use until the 23rd century when scientists finally proved out several key facets of the nature of the cosmos as described in 99's blog. Prior to these proofs, it was widely believed that 99's blog was itself a hoax. This skepticism had persisted for several centuries due to 99's lack of advanced mathematical theory which rendered him unable to articulate in his blog the mathematical concepts scientists would need to understand commonly accepted facts that he had been taught in grade school.
A useful analogy taken from an actual event in human history would be to take a star Blukker player in her prime, stick her in an ordinary Plonomax Node Generator field, send her back to Medieval Europe armed with nothing more than an embedded universal translator so that she could communicate with the natives, and have her try to explain to them how to design and build a machine to return her to her own node. Impossible, right? Indeed it turned out to be, as was proven when archives came to light revealing that this exact experiment was performed by scientists under Hung-Xao's regime. It is believed the Blukker player was none other than Linda McCallister who is famous for having disappeared without a trace at the height of her career in the WLBS during the Shanghai Olympics, and that she was ultimately found guilty of witchcraft and burned at the stake.
At the heart of it, what Buck 99's blog revealed was that over cosmological timescales (which are non-linear, since universes are born and die sequentially in relation to each other yet exist in parallel), a universe's dark energy component fluctuates wildly, since dark energy is shared across universes while associating with only one universe at a time. 21st century scientists knew that the universe's expansion was accelerating and that the dark energy seemed sufficient to ensure a universe that expanded ad infinitum, but they failed to account for as-yet unobserved binding of dark energy by adjoining universes.
Take today, for example. Buck doesn't have squat to say, but if you're reading this, then he's already taken up a few moments of your precious time for nothing. Are you entertained? Do you find this intriguing, or even mildly interesting? Doubtfully. So if you don't want your day to be a total loss, it is in your best interest to read no further.
You have been warned.
******************
"To provide some context for Buck's situation and the epic struggle he was about to face," typed Buck shortly after conquering a programming bug at work that had been bothering him since the previous day, "it is convenient to introduce a new term to represent a time scale that 21st century readers weren't aware of prior to its discovery in their future. The unit of time is called the g-pon*, equivalent to the average lifespan of known universes. A g-pon is roughly equal to 32.71552 x googol-plex Earth years, based on the precise duration of an Earth year on January 1st of the year 2237. When g-pon is used in the plural sense, it sometimes takes on a slightly different meaning, referring to an instance of a specific universe that occured sequentially prior to our own (see entire footnote below). For example: the phrase 'three g-pons ago' would indicate any time within the lifetime of a universe Alpha-3, which ran its full life cycle before our current universe (Alpha-0) began, and also indicates that two other universes (Alpha-2 and Alpha-1, in that order) ran their full life cycles before our universe began its first iteration.
Buck decided not to go into a universe's iterative properties. Some things were better left unknown.
"Anyway, eleven g-pons ago, an intelligent entity capitalized on the dark matter energy transfer betwixt universes to translate himself from one universe to the next in an effort to elude his enemies. This intelligent entity was the last of his kind, and in fact wasn't truly alive in any conventional sense at the time of his escape. Technology had enabled him to preserve his memories and thought patterns in a device which resembled a small orb, even as the horde of evil beings which had wiped his own race out of existence had brought death to his physical form. It was all part of a carefully orchestrated plan which required him to penetrate to the heart of the enemy home world. When he allowed himself to be captured and executed, his memories transferred to the orb which was hidden on that world. The orb served a dual purpose: not only did it contain the elements of his identity, but also it was a vessel devised to slip into the dark energy nodestream moments after its initialization. Slipping such an object through to the next universe brought no harm to the object itself, but as he well knew, such an action was best practiced deep in the vacuum of space, far from populated worlds, due to the dark energy anti-matter after-shock event that occurred in the source universe when such an event took place. In other words, when the evil beings executed him, they doomed their own home planet and its star system, wiping out a healthy chunk of their civilization along the way and leaving the scattered remnants of their species to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened."
Buck then decided that this was a patently ridiculous literary path to follow. He wasn't about to argue that memories and thought patterns (or general disposition, brainwaves, etc.) were equivalent to the soul, which is really what he'd want a character to have. So he found himself at a place where he was hypothesizing an immortal being (more like an "identity") who more or less latches onto the bodies and souls of those who happen upon the vessel. In other words, these beings who find the vessel remain true to themselves and their general nature, but they absorb his experiences and ways of thinking, along with those of anyone else who found the orb along the way. This goes on for several g-pons, of course, which brings him into the current universe where the orb manages to slip into a black hole, the same black hole, in fact, where Buck's ship is being smashed into plasma.
Does Buck obtain the orb and the memories of trillions of beings who have shared the immortal entity's life across the universes and use the knowledge contained therein to escape the fate of which he isn't even aware? Is it what makes him aware of his true, external circumstances? Or is some other character in Buck's life the keeper of the orb? How did the sinister beings track the orb down across the cosmos in their effort to seek revenge for the destruction of their civilization? Is the intelligence mentioned in last week's post behind the black racer snake's eyes one of these aliens out for the entity's destruction? Are these the same evil beings who were Will anyone really give a rat's ass?
How does dark energy create an explosion of any magnitude when it's really thought to be nothing more than the residual negative energy of empty space, containing an almost unimaginably low quantity of energy per cubic centimeter? You see, Buck actually went and looked this stuff up a few days after drafting the premise above. It turns out that dark energy accounts for something like 74% of the universe's mass, but it's homogeneous, spread out equally in little tiny portions throughout the void between the planets, stars, galaxies, clouds, clusters, and all the other stuff that's out there, a good 20% of which is called "dark matter," a blanket term used to refer to a whole class of invisible objects which scientists are pretty sure is out there (one example is dead stars which no longer produce light). So anyone who reads Buck's account of the dark energy anti-matter explosion is going to think, "Huh?" Buck doesn't want that: he's hardcore. He wants his science fiction to be possible.
So he decided, at least for the time being, to abandon this possible thread of fiction on his blog, but he did chose to go ahead and publish this entry. If for no other reason it's because he liked the footnote that he wrote below. Meanwhile, all that was left to do was explain the title, "The 12." At the end of each universe, or when the time is right, the entity creates another orb, and sends it and all the previous orbs through to the next universe. This is to propagate the new life form he has essentially created via the use of this technology. So there wasn't going to be just one entity, but in Buck's time, twelve (with eleven orbs, the orb for the current universe not yet created). The experiences and memories associated with each are wildly different, and of course each can come into the possession of any manner of intelligent being, so that equates to twelve bad-asses running around the universe alternately wreaking havoc, playing hero, or just plain wandering.
Of course, this too was full of holes, since the number of orbs could grow exponentially, since each possessor could make a copy and send it through. Buck considered that maybe there was some logical rule enforced that required all orbs to be brought together for another to be created. This would force the beings who possessed the orbs to seek out the others, possibly fighting for control of all of them. Naturally this reeks of being like the standard "Highlander" premise, unless Buck writes it more as a cooperative venture, which would allow for the revenge-seeking aliens to play a more serious role as potential spoilers of the original entity's grand plan.
Maybe Buck will take up this idea again one day, but what he really feels is missing is the human element, and how to make the reader give a flying fuck about the original entity and his mission. That, and what to call the bad beings. The right name for that species could make or break it...and what makes them special? What separates them from the orcs of the literary world?
"Cheers, oh faithful reader," writes Buck as he returns to work.
* Footnote: From the Encyclopedia Galactica, ST 3260: g-pon is pronounced /jē'- pŏn/, or alternatively, /jə - pŏn'/. Etymology: A form of snigglet combining the terms "googol-plex" (10 to the 10th to the 100th power) and "eon", an ambiguous measure of geologic time. The term was coined by Buck 99 in the 25th century but discovered by 21st century readers via a web log ("blog") that he somehow published on an actual, real-world blog on 21st century Earth's primitive Internet network from a nearly identical network located within a fictitious LifeNet© simulation context aboard a private spacecraft accelerating into a black hole's gravity well. How he managed to pull this off is a matter of continued speculation and arguably the most brilliant technological feat in the history of the human race. It is conjectured that he used the black-hole's x-ray emissions as the means to transmit the data, but how he mastered an understanding of singularities and their effect on time to deliver a message to 21st century Earth, and how he managed to ensure that a mechanism existed in the real world of 21st century Earth to receive the transmission and upload it automatically to the necessary network servers, remain enigmas that defy mortal comprehension.
The term itself did not come into widespread use until the 23rd century when scientists finally proved out several key facets of the nature of the cosmos as described in 99's blog. Prior to these proofs, it was widely believed that 99's blog was itself a hoax. This skepticism had persisted for several centuries due to 99's lack of advanced mathematical theory which rendered him unable to articulate in his blog the mathematical concepts scientists would need to understand commonly accepted facts that he had been taught in grade school.
A useful analogy taken from an actual event in human history would be to take a star Blukker player in her prime, stick her in an ordinary Plonomax Node Generator field, send her back to Medieval Europe armed with nothing more than an embedded universal translator so that she could communicate with the natives, and have her try to explain to them how to design and build a machine to return her to her own node. Impossible, right? Indeed it turned out to be, as was proven when archives came to light revealing that this exact experiment was performed by scientists under Hung-Xao's regime. It is believed the Blukker player was none other than Linda McCallister who is famous for having disappeared without a trace at the height of her career in the WLBS during the Shanghai Olympics, and that she was ultimately found guilty of witchcraft and burned at the stake.
At the heart of it, what Buck 99's blog revealed was that over cosmological timescales (which are non-linear, since universes are born and die sequentially in relation to each other yet exist in parallel), a universe's dark energy component fluctuates wildly, since dark energy is shared across universes while associating with only one universe at a time. 21st century scientists knew that the universe's expansion was accelerating and that the dark energy seemed sufficient to ensure a universe that expanded ad infinitum, but they failed to account for as-yet unobserved binding of dark energy by adjoining universes.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Meditations
"Our hero, the intrepid Buck 99," wrote the blogger by the same name and who didn't really know what the word "intrepid" meant, "continued to fall inexorably into the infinitely dense oblivion of the black hole while his spaceship's damaged LifeNet© system (see "Into the Rabbit Hole", September 5, 2006, and enjoy the gratuitous addition of the copyright character) fed his slumbering mind a series of fictional scenarios designed to trick him into believing that he was leading a typical, middle-class, Caucasian, 21st century American life. As stated before, the singularity's effect on Buck's perception of time was inversely proportional to the accelerating rate of his descent, effectively rendering him immortal. Tragically, instead of forever surfing the waves of Oahu's North Shore as he would have been doing had the Hawaiian surfing program he intended to run been initiated, he was stuck doing time as a cube jockey thanks to his buddy e-Taco who switched the programs on Buck as a practical joke just before lift-off."
Buck checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was observing him as he typed his blog entry on client time. Not that it was a big deal: Buck was in a strange situation. He had a new client that he hadn't even met yet, so his days were spent teaching himself new skills which he would need once the client surfaced from wherever he was hiding to reveal what the actual project would be. All Buck knew was that he would be doing systems analysis, software design for web application middleware development, and the actual development work itself. He did not know, however, what system he would be working on or what business need the application would satisfy. For once, Buck was actually eager to get started. This was the kind of work he was born to do, and he was way ahead of schedule on the self-paced tutorials.
The coast was clear, so Buck continued his third person narrative.
"Buck wasn't sure whether he hoped he was a better programmer in his fictional life than he was in his real life. In real life he had made an egregious error when programming his ship's navcom system, resulting in the perilous situation with the black hole of which he was blissfully unaware." (Here Buck paused to consider the implausibility that he would be able to write about something in his blog about which he had no knowledge, and asked his forgiving readers to "suspend disbelief," to borrow a phrase from the vernacular of his fictional American context, and absorb the footnote* at the end of this entry as a possible explanation.)
"His real life error, however, had some unintentional and not necessarily undesired consequences. Sure, his self-aware avatar was stuck in a cubicle day in and day out, and yes, the program came equipped with an apparently incurable chronic back pain disorder. But he had immortality, and thanks to recent innovations in 25th century technology, he had free will within the Context. Yes, the Context enforced certain rules: he would age, he would die, and he did not have the telekinetic powers or x-ray vision he so craved. When he finally died within the Context, however, he would be re-initialized, and who knew what deviations from the original programing would follow as a result of distortions caused by the singularity? The possibilities were endless. It could be a fantastic adventure.
"Perhaps the greatest surprise of the whole experience was the existence of the wonderful Mrs. 99, and the life and family they had built together. Were they nothing more than objects instantiated by the Context and incorporated into his perceptions ? Buck didn't think so. They were too...transcendent. Mrs. 99's wisdom and emotional range was way beyond his and any of the 25th century programming powerhouses' capacity to reproduce. Instead, it was more likely that the unconscious mind had a back door through which it was connected to a network of other souls, souls belonging perhaps to bodies that, like his, had been sucked into the gravity well of the black hole. Had they, unlike Buck with the LifeNet© simulation, no consciousness available for them to draw on, and were therefore drawn toward his "reality" as to a beacon of light or a lifeboat adrift in dark, fathomless seas of non-being?
"In any event he was thankful for their company, because without them he wouldn't survive the horrors of Cubopolis."
Buck savored the syrupy sentimentality of what he had just written before caving in to the demands of the testosterone with which all true men are endowed. "Consider for a moment," he wrote to address the reader directly, "the lifespan of this magnificent black hole. Perhaps it is billions of years old. How many others have succumbed to its pull? Tens? Hundreds? Billions?
"A better question to ask might be what kinds of beings might it have drawn in? After all, Buck was in deep space, far beyond the range in which homo sapiens represented the only intelligence. Humans who had ventured this far and returned to tell the tale spoke of vile, unmentionable alien beings, abominations of nature of frightening appearance, terrifying intelligence, and sometimes even poor fashion sense. What if some of them were adrift in the sea of unconsciousness too, and were becoming naturally drawn to the beacon of Buck's LifeNet© scenario? What then?
"In what would become a classic great moment in bad timing, some of these beings would slip into Buck's simulation via the portal behind his unconscious mind at precisely the wrong time, when things were starting to go well. Buck had passed his Java certification exam, taken a relaxing vacation at home, taken some time to learn some new programming skills, and finally rid himself of the mantle of Project Manager by being staffed on a project to do precisely what he hoped to do: design and build software. It wasn't longboard surfing in a tropical paradise, but it wasn't project management either, and it guaranteed that he would be left alone to do his thing at least part of the day. The days always passed more quickly when he was immersed in the code.
"Other things were going well, too. Mrs. 99 was homeschooling the kids, and by all meaningful measures the change was doing everyone good. It was the right decision. Meanwhile, Buck had found a new passion: reptiles. Buck was now an amateur herpetologist involved with a local herpetological society, hanging out with scientists and academics and striving to conserve and protect the environments of reptiles and amphibians. He was also a budding herpetoculturalist, having acquired a total of nine pythons (seven Python regia and two Morelia viridia). It was possible that he might be able to manage a side business breeding them, or dare he dream? He might even turn it into a full-time career. He had become a moderator of a major herpetocultural site and a respected member of several others. The internet was a rapidly growing marketing channel for reptiles, and he had technical skills to bring to bear in that space. Life was looking up for Buck.
"He even managed to win the July 2007 Photograph of the Month on the herp society's web site. It was a classic close-up shot of a Coluber constrictor constrictor, and if you looked closely at the photograph, you could see the distorted image of Buck and his companions in the reflection of the snake's eye.
"But Buck failed to see something else in that reflection, something that by appearances was quite faint and may have been a trick of the light or something shadowy that might have been hovering just over his shoulder when the picture was taken, but in truth was surfacing from within an alien soul lurking hatefully behind the serpentine avatar that had writhed in vain to free itself from its human captors as the digital image was captured..."
...to be continued...
* Buck's explanation for how he can write about the black hole about which he has no knowledge: Buck is a creative writer, after all, and where, he asks, do creative ideas originate? The best ones always come to mind unbidden, as if from another place, but in truth they come from the unconscious mind, the back of the mind. The back of the mind knows more than it lets on. To hit a tennis ball correctly, for example, the body must coordinate hundreds of muscles making thousands of major and minor adjustments into one smoothly orchestrated physical act. The front of the mind cannot and does not keep track of all the details, of course: the back of the mind does. How hard is the pinkie squeezing during the follow-through? What's the left ankle doing as the racquet strikes the ball? Think about how complex such a simple act truly is. When a player is "in the zone," the front of the mind simply watches the ball and lets the back of the mind handle the rest (thanks to Timothy Gallwey, author of Inner Tennis, for the analogy).
So while Buck's conscious mind (or at least the consciousness he perceives within The Context) is unaware of the peril his true body is in, his unconscious mind, the back part of his mind, is still alert to the disposition of the body and what is really going on. LifeNet© has event handling to prevent the back of the mind from seizing control and awakening the sleeper except in emergencies (which the navcom missed, in this case, thanks to Buck's lackadaisical attention to detail when coding systems upon which his life would depend), but the unconscious self cannot be completely prevented from notifying the consciousness of things it deems of importance. In other words, Buck's unconscious self is expressing the truth as a wild idea which Buck's Context consciousness is mistaking for creativity.
Buck checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was observing him as he typed his blog entry on client time. Not that it was a big deal: Buck was in a strange situation. He had a new client that he hadn't even met yet, so his days were spent teaching himself new skills which he would need once the client surfaced from wherever he was hiding to reveal what the actual project would be. All Buck knew was that he would be doing systems analysis, software design for web application middleware development, and the actual development work itself. He did not know, however, what system he would be working on or what business need the application would satisfy. For once, Buck was actually eager to get started. This was the kind of work he was born to do, and he was way ahead of schedule on the self-paced tutorials.
The coast was clear, so Buck continued his third person narrative.
"Buck wasn't sure whether he hoped he was a better programmer in his fictional life than he was in his real life. In real life he had made an egregious error when programming his ship's navcom system, resulting in the perilous situation with the black hole of which he was blissfully unaware." (Here Buck paused to consider the implausibility that he would be able to write about something in his blog about which he had no knowledge, and asked his forgiving readers to "suspend disbelief," to borrow a phrase from the vernacular of his fictional American context, and absorb the footnote* at the end of this entry as a possible explanation.)
"His real life error, however, had some unintentional and not necessarily undesired consequences. Sure, his self-aware avatar was stuck in a cubicle day in and day out, and yes, the program came equipped with an apparently incurable chronic back pain disorder. But he had immortality, and thanks to recent innovations in 25th century technology, he had free will within the Context. Yes, the Context enforced certain rules: he would age, he would die, and he did not have the telekinetic powers or x-ray vision he so craved. When he finally died within the Context, however, he would be re-initialized, and who knew what deviations from the original programing would follow as a result of distortions caused by the singularity? The possibilities were endless. It could be a fantastic adventure.
"Perhaps the greatest surprise of the whole experience was the existence of the wonderful Mrs. 99, and the life and family they had built together. Were they nothing more than objects instantiated by the Context and incorporated into his perceptions ? Buck didn't think so. They were too...transcendent. Mrs. 99's wisdom and emotional range was way beyond his and any of the 25th century programming powerhouses' capacity to reproduce. Instead, it was more likely that the unconscious mind had a back door through which it was connected to a network of other souls, souls belonging perhaps to bodies that, like his, had been sucked into the gravity well of the black hole. Had they, unlike Buck with the LifeNet© simulation, no consciousness available for them to draw on, and were therefore drawn toward his "reality" as to a beacon of light or a lifeboat adrift in dark, fathomless seas of non-being?
"In any event he was thankful for their company, because without them he wouldn't survive the horrors of Cubopolis."
Buck savored the syrupy sentimentality of what he had just written before caving in to the demands of the testosterone with which all true men are endowed. "Consider for a moment," he wrote to address the reader directly, "the lifespan of this magnificent black hole. Perhaps it is billions of years old. How many others have succumbed to its pull? Tens? Hundreds? Billions?
"A better question to ask might be what kinds of beings might it have drawn in? After all, Buck was in deep space, far beyond the range in which homo sapiens represented the only intelligence. Humans who had ventured this far and returned to tell the tale spoke of vile, unmentionable alien beings, abominations of nature of frightening appearance, terrifying intelligence, and sometimes even poor fashion sense. What if some of them were adrift in the sea of unconsciousness too, and were becoming naturally drawn to the beacon of Buck's LifeNet© scenario? What then?
"In what would become a classic great moment in bad timing, some of these beings would slip into Buck's simulation via the portal behind his unconscious mind at precisely the wrong time, when things were starting to go well. Buck had passed his Java certification exam, taken a relaxing vacation at home, taken some time to learn some new programming skills, and finally rid himself of the mantle of Project Manager by being staffed on a project to do precisely what he hoped to do: design and build software. It wasn't longboard surfing in a tropical paradise, but it wasn't project management either, and it guaranteed that he would be left alone to do his thing at least part of the day. The days always passed more quickly when he was immersed in the code.
"Other things were going well, too. Mrs. 99 was homeschooling the kids, and by all meaningful measures the change was doing everyone good. It was the right decision. Meanwhile, Buck had found a new passion: reptiles. Buck was now an amateur herpetologist involved with a local herpetological society, hanging out with scientists and academics and striving to conserve and protect the environments of reptiles and amphibians. He was also a budding herpetoculturalist, having acquired a total of nine pythons (seven Python regia and two Morelia viridia). It was possible that he might be able to manage a side business breeding them, or dare he dream? He might even turn it into a full-time career. He had become a moderator of a major herpetocultural site and a respected member of several others. The internet was a rapidly growing marketing channel for reptiles, and he had technical skills to bring to bear in that space. Life was looking up for Buck.
"He even managed to win the July 2007 Photograph of the Month on the herp society's web site. It was a classic close-up shot of a Coluber constrictor constrictor, and if you looked closely at the photograph, you could see the distorted image of Buck and his companions in the reflection of the snake's eye.
"But Buck failed to see something else in that reflection, something that by appearances was quite faint and may have been a trick of the light or something shadowy that might have been hovering just over his shoulder when the picture was taken, but in truth was surfacing from within an alien soul lurking hatefully behind the serpentine avatar that had writhed in vain to free itself from its human captors as the digital image was captured..."
...to be continued...
* Buck's explanation for how he can write about the black hole about which he has no knowledge: Buck is a creative writer, after all, and where, he asks, do creative ideas originate? The best ones always come to mind unbidden, as if from another place, but in truth they come from the unconscious mind, the back of the mind. The back of the mind knows more than it lets on. To hit a tennis ball correctly, for example, the body must coordinate hundreds of muscles making thousands of major and minor adjustments into one smoothly orchestrated physical act. The front of the mind cannot and does not keep track of all the details, of course: the back of the mind does. How hard is the pinkie squeezing during the follow-through? What's the left ankle doing as the racquet strikes the ball? Think about how complex such a simple act truly is. When a player is "in the zone," the front of the mind simply watches the ball and lets the back of the mind handle the rest (thanks to Timothy Gallwey, author of Inner Tennis, for the analogy).
So while Buck's conscious mind (or at least the consciousness he perceives within The Context) is unaware of the peril his true body is in, his unconscious mind, the back part of his mind, is still alert to the disposition of the body and what is really going on. LifeNet© has event handling to prevent the back of the mind from seizing control and awakening the sleeper except in emergencies (which the navcom missed, in this case, thanks to Buck's lackadaisical attention to detail when coding systems upon which his life would depend), but the unconscious self cannot be completely prevented from notifying the consciousness of things it deems of importance. In other words, Buck's unconscious self is expressing the truth as a wild idea which Buck's Context consciousness is mistaking for creativity.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Retraction
Buck has been informed by one of his faithful readers (hereafter known simply as "The Professor") that the last installment of his continuing adventures had a more bitter tone than usual. After further review of the blog entry in question, Buck is forced to agree with The Professor.
Additionally, Buck notices that the overall structure of the entry is completely inconsistent with the chronicles' hallmark narrative, third-person format. Therefore, in an effort to right this wrong, Buck submits the following entry intended to convey the same information as the previous one, except that the new entry will follow all the conventions of the idiom as established over the history of this blog:
---------------------------------------------------------
"Suddenly," wrote Buck from his desk, a desk which exposed both his back and his computer screen to the scrutiny of his client, "the client called Buck and a fellow consulting associate into a conference room. Pleasantries were exchanged: the client was about to take a three-day weekend vacation to a distant metropolis, and the consultants were politely questioned about their own weekend plans. In a bid to discourage any requests that might compromise his weekend freedoms, Buck made sure to mention that he did, in point of fact, have extensive plans. That his plans were frivolous and easily rescheduled he neglected to mention.
"The client shut the door, sat down and immediately underwent a complete personality change. He proceeded to launch into a sarcastic tirade, for lack of a better term."
Here Buck struggled for a moment, certain that the English language offered a noun more apropos than "tirade," especially since the client's voice remained calm throughout, despite the hostile undertones in plain evidence. Since no such perfect word was forthcoming he elected to give up and move on, after a furtive glance over his shoulder to ensure that he was not being observed. "The client spoke of the project (actually it's a program) in a curious way. 'Let's pretend for a moment,' he began, 'that there's a project, hypothetically speaking, and let's pretend this project's name is Smackdown.' "
"Buck bristled with anticipated rage, for 'Smackdown' was the actual name of the project*, not a hypothetical name at all, and the client was engaging in sarcasm, a tool he had historically proven to be clumsy with at best. It meant bad news for Buck and his friend, for the client had adopted the kind of tone one takes when chiding errant young children. He was treating the consultants like little kids, serving up a dis [sic] of cold scorn with a side of utter disregard for peoples' feelings. He proceeded to rant about the 'health' of the project and complained that he shouldn't be telling them about it, but they should be telling him. To professionals such as Buck and his colleague, this went without saying, it being part of the established principles and dogma of program and project management with which they had been programmed. And what the client was proclaiming hadn't happened, i.e., that the consultants hadn't been forthright in providing him important information about the health of the program, had actually happened on many occasions, but the client had a way of not hearing what he didn't want to hear. He was also deliberately withholding critical information so that he would have an opportunity to make the consultants appear ignorant and incompetent, and he unintentionally exposed this fact during his monologue.
"Buck was not the target of the lecture," he wrote of himself in the third person. "He was just a guy who would have to deliver one of the slides of the PowerPoint deck that this whole attack was intended to elicit. The major things the client was complaining about were squarely the responsibility of Buck's partner, the PMO Project Manager. Why the client had decided to slam the poor guy in Buck's presence was beyond comprehension, especially given the context that the client's own managers and peers were absent from the room. Why attack a guy who is supposed to be helping you? Why attack your consultant, who is your advocate, when there is no political ground to be gained, no one present who can witness you pinning the blame on the outsider?
"It's not like the client didn't want consultants around," Buck continued, almost but not quite certain that nobody was watching him. "By contrast, it was this very client who had wanted to bring in the team of consultants to begin with to help him manage a disparate group of people who didn't want project management practices employed at all. The PM consultant was on his side!
"Worse," raged Buck, "the client had put the consultants in an impossible position, requiring just two of them to institute the entire program and project management infrastructure (bearing in mind that the program includes well over 100 people), execute against it, perform in the roles of what would normally be eight people, all while trying to deliver against an inherently ridiculous time line in a culture where the performers resented the program leadership and, as fate would have it, didn't even report up to that leadership! It was an enterprise doomed to fail, and Dickless knew it."
"Is this true?" asked the seductive and always alert Mrs. 99.
"Yes it's true," replied Buck. "The client has no dick."
---------------------------------------------------------
Buck would like to extend special thanks to The Professor for calling Buck out on the quality of his earlier post, and also to the writers of the movie "Ghostbusters" featuring Bill Murray for inspiring the climactic punch-line.
* "Smackdown" isn't the real name of the project either, but Buck protects his anonymity from the client, just as Clark Kent doesn't go around telling Lex and his buddies that his real name is Kal-El and that he likes to dress up in bright, flashy tights.
Additionally, Buck notices that the overall structure of the entry is completely inconsistent with the chronicles' hallmark narrative, third-person format. Therefore, in an effort to right this wrong, Buck submits the following entry intended to convey the same information as the previous one, except that the new entry will follow all the conventions of the idiom as established over the history of this blog:
---------------------------------------------------------
"Suddenly," wrote Buck from his desk, a desk which exposed both his back and his computer screen to the scrutiny of his client, "the client called Buck and a fellow consulting associate into a conference room. Pleasantries were exchanged: the client was about to take a three-day weekend vacation to a distant metropolis, and the consultants were politely questioned about their own weekend plans. In a bid to discourage any requests that might compromise his weekend freedoms, Buck made sure to mention that he did, in point of fact, have extensive plans. That his plans were frivolous and easily rescheduled he neglected to mention.
"The client shut the door, sat down and immediately underwent a complete personality change. He proceeded to launch into a sarcastic tirade, for lack of a better term."
Here Buck struggled for a moment, certain that the English language offered a noun more apropos than "tirade," especially since the client's voice remained calm throughout, despite the hostile undertones in plain evidence. Since no such perfect word was forthcoming he elected to give up and move on, after a furtive glance over his shoulder to ensure that he was not being observed. "The client spoke of the project (actually it's a program) in a curious way. 'Let's pretend for a moment,' he began, 'that there's a project, hypothetically speaking, and let's pretend this project's name is Smackdown.' "
"Buck bristled with anticipated rage, for 'Smackdown' was the actual name of the project*, not a hypothetical name at all, and the client was engaging in sarcasm, a tool he had historically proven to be clumsy with at best. It meant bad news for Buck and his friend, for the client had adopted the kind of tone one takes when chiding errant young children. He was treating the consultants like little kids, serving up a dis [sic] of cold scorn with a side of utter disregard for peoples' feelings. He proceeded to rant about the 'health' of the project and complained that he shouldn't be telling them about it, but they should be telling him. To professionals such as Buck and his colleague, this went without saying, it being part of the established principles and dogma of program and project management with which they had been programmed. And what the client was proclaiming hadn't happened, i.e., that the consultants hadn't been forthright in providing him important information about the health of the program, had actually happened on many occasions, but the client had a way of not hearing what he didn't want to hear. He was also deliberately withholding critical information so that he would have an opportunity to make the consultants appear ignorant and incompetent, and he unintentionally exposed this fact during his monologue.
"Buck was not the target of the lecture," he wrote of himself in the third person. "He was just a guy who would have to deliver one of the slides of the PowerPoint deck that this whole attack was intended to elicit. The major things the client was complaining about were squarely the responsibility of Buck's partner, the PMO Project Manager. Why the client had decided to slam the poor guy in Buck's presence was beyond comprehension, especially given the context that the client's own managers and peers were absent from the room. Why attack a guy who is supposed to be helping you? Why attack your consultant, who is your advocate, when there is no political ground to be gained, no one present who can witness you pinning the blame on the outsider?
"It's not like the client didn't want consultants around," Buck continued, almost but not quite certain that nobody was watching him. "By contrast, it was this very client who had wanted to bring in the team of consultants to begin with to help him manage a disparate group of people who didn't want project management practices employed at all. The PM consultant was on his side!
"Worse," raged Buck, "the client had put the consultants in an impossible position, requiring just two of them to institute the entire program and project management infrastructure (bearing in mind that the program includes well over 100 people), execute against it, perform in the roles of what would normally be eight people, all while trying to deliver against an inherently ridiculous time line in a culture where the performers resented the program leadership and, as fate would have it, didn't even report up to that leadership! It was an enterprise doomed to fail, and Dickless knew it."
"Is this true?" asked the seductive and always alert Mrs. 99.
"Yes it's true," replied Buck. "The client has no dick."
---------------------------------------------------------
Buck would like to extend special thanks to The Professor for calling Buck out on the quality of his earlier post, and also to the writers of the movie "Ghostbusters" featuring Bill Murray for inspiring the climactic punch-line.
* "Smackdown" isn't the real name of the project either, but Buck protects his anonymity from the client, just as Clark Kent doesn't go around telling Lex and his buddies that his real name is Kal-El and that he likes to dress up in bright, flashy tights.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Addendum to The Laws of Consultancy
The client will use you as a shield to hide his incompetence. Your job is to bend over and take it, bitch.
You are the client's advocate. His success is your number one priority. Your client can't succeed if you allow his weaknesses to be exposed. And if his weaknesses are so profound that you can't possibly avoid them being exposed, you must allow the burden of blame to fall upon you. It is your job.
God help you, though, if your client is so stupid as to actually believe the lies he spreads about your own incompetency, because then it will show up in the feedback he provides about you that ends up in your annual review.
So sayeth Buck.
You are the client's advocate. His success is your number one priority. Your client can't succeed if you allow his weaknesses to be exposed. And if his weaknesses are so profound that you can't possibly avoid them being exposed, you must allow the burden of blame to fall upon you. It is your job.
God help you, though, if your client is so stupid as to actually believe the lies he spreads about your own incompetency, because then it will show up in the feedback he provides about you that ends up in your annual review.
So sayeth Buck.
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