Jack of Harts

There are two main types of characters we see in horror stories. This covers suspense and action and many others, but it is most famous for horror stories, and by far horror MOVIES.

The most famous characters in horror movies are the characters who don’t know they are in horror movies. They are the victims.

The next most famous type of character in horror movies, not counting the horrors themselves of course, are the characters who KNOW they are in a horror movie. They tend to be well armed and are either quickly killed in the opening five seconds or they last all the way to the end of the movie where they may or may not survive based on whether the movie makers want a triumphant hero or a meaningful sacrifice.

I know what both of those feel like in a small way. I recently found some websites that do AI stories. Not stories written by AI, but stories created by humans and placed in the hands of an AI to tell. They are like the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books when I was a kid. In those you were given a choice with two or three possibilities that would take you to another page and a continuation of the story. In the end you would find a conclusion that was either good or bad or sometimes neutral. The goal of course was to go through every possibility to see the whole adventure. I used to just straight up read the books from cover to cover so I could see ALL of the possible stories.

These new AI-run stories are like that. A human decides the starting rules of the universe, the characters, and stuff like that, and you the reader are off to the races. Of course you can type in whatever you want, which makes it much more interactive. I turned a charming coming of age light romance story into a horror story and did not realize I did it. The AI went all in, and it took me nearly a day to figure out what was up. I was totally the character in a horror movie that had no idea he was in a horror movie. I had already written him in as being very competent though. Observant. Quiet. Driven. All the things you WANT in a horror movie. He still had no clue he was in a horror movie. He thought he was in a light romance coming of age story. It was a rude surprise when I finally figured out what was going on. And it was all because the AI ran with something I wrote in a way I absolutely did not expect it to.

Bravo. I was entertained. And totally creeped out. I was the player who did not know he was playing a horror game and trying to figure out where all his friends were…

I’m writing the next part of Transformers Rebirth at the moment. Totally fan fiction, but there to do something I want to do and cleanse the writing mind for the next Captain William Carter story. In the previous story that was published in the Teletran fan magazine, Fort Max called on some Wreckers to do a job. They are like the Dirty Dozen. Aggressively competent at blowing stuff up with a high body count. They were originally created as a way for Simon Furman to write stories about Transformers characters that weren’t shown in the Marvel comics published in America. And for him to be a bit more destructive in ways the more kid-friendly American comic couldn’t be. So for this story, the big peacenick Fort Max has realized the job he needs to do is too big for him and his fellow peacenik scientists and accountants. He needs the Wreckers. Last story was him getting them interested in the job. THIS story is the job. This story is fun to write as it shows the differences between the three main factions in very clear detail. And showing Fort Max’s reaction to all of that is just fun to write.

There are five major calendar systems in use in the world right now.

The Hebrew calendar that goes back over 5,000 years.
The Chinese calendar that goes back over 3,000 years.
The Indian Vikram Samvat system that goes back to great military victory half a century before the birth of Christ.
Our own Gregorian system built on the older Julian system created in the same general time as the Indian system, and that originally pointed back to the foundation of Rome, over seven hundred years before the birth of Christ.
And the Islamic Hijiri system that points back to the foundation of their religion.

All of these calendars predate the concept of the number zero. Measuring nothing was not something we thought about as a people when these calendars were created. There is no Year Zero in any of them. There is a Year One. And the year before that is Year Minus One. Because time is something, and we weren’t measuring zero time.

Most of us have grown up utterly believing in the concept of the number zero. The idea that everything starts at zero and must be counted before it becomes one. But centuries ago, when the calendars that we run our lives on right now were created, we didn’t measure something until it existed. Year One.

We should all consider what that means for all of us.