Quartet for the End of Time #3
He was a blacksmith and a carpenter and a knight and a weaver and an innkeeper and a farmer and a housewife and a priest and a physician and a king.
When he was just Jules, or tried to be, he wrote alone and kept to himself, to his own mind.
The writers’ room didn’t help anymore. They had no good ideas.
He hated the conferences, the pitches from young, ambitious writers, the meetings spent hashing out executive displeasures.
Staff to manage and assistants to placate.
Jules preferred to compose his symphony on his own terms.
He was always dreaming and never asleep.
He watched, and reviewed, and relived. He relived every life they had built and sent out into the world, every constructed memory, every implanted personality.
Into the conference rooms he brought in screens, dozens of them, linked to every camera and location across the land.
On the table in front of him he kept the neuroscanner, his dream maker, always charged, always linked to his own mind.
On the screens he followed his characters, saw their movements, tracked their conversations. And from the neuroscanner he saw their pasts. Saw their oldest thoughts and desires.
Into a recorder he spoke his notes.
Cleo is spending a lot of time with the baker, but only when his wife is running errands. The baker reminds her of her dead husband. This should be discouraged. Will lead to unsuitable complications.
Maximus has been bored lately. Drinking too much. Must devise mission for him soon. Will coordinate with ongoing Council plots.
Too many children in Kingstown. Will result in unacceptable numbers of casualties following attack by Eastern Riders next spring. Consult Percival the blacksmith; he has fondness for children from memories, can be induced to travel with children on some sort of to-be-determined adventure.
Footage recorded by cameras came through at all hours.
Jules flagged them, annotating notes about what was useful, what was needed, what was disposable for Clint or Larry or someone in Burbank who would package it for mass consumption.
But Jules had bigger plans now. Not just an edited digest. Everything needed to work.
Too much of the story was simply extras, people wandering around their little lives and worried about the most undramatic and least interesting things.
Food and work and family squabbles. Jules only had, perhaps, a dozen interesting characters.
The few remaining Council heroes, a couple of knights, and one or two new young fighters.
But those kids were born and raised within the Malicarn, and Jules did not have any memory banks on which to draw from, or understand them.
The first time he implemented himself, the way forward became clear.
The body was dead, but it didn’t matter.
Jules saw the killer’s life clearly: childhood as an orphan, brother eaten by a troll, loneliness in a monastery.
He saw the old memories, too. Ball games at Camden Yards.
Jump-starting a car battery. Sitting at home, scrolling through streaming channels, looking for something to watch.
But what struck Jules were the recent memories.
Stabbing a woman through the heart. The fluttering in his stomach when she went limp.
The mad desire to kill again. Those were useful. Jules could do something with that.
The task of creating new memories started as an experiment, a way for Jules to get inside the head of the young, unscanned characters and understand them.
Such characters were popular, notes from the studio always giving them glowing reviews.
“Wholesome, pure,” they said. Which meant “Feature them more.”
Jules reverse-engineered a method to program simple memories pulled from his own mind, using the surviving R & D computers.
Strong smells, like flowers. Or the feel of the hot sun.
Simple enough nodes that Jules could upload them into the neuroscanner and build it onto a preexisting profile.
But writing a whole new profile, a new personality, was much harder.
So he uploaded himself. At first he only did a little, memories of his own time in the Malicarn. But soon he added the rest: early days in LA, his stint teaching college writing, undergrad nights bouncing around New York, childhood summer camp and trumpet lessons and his uncle’s sailboat.
Once Jules put himself into the neuroscanner he could build up other memories.
Ones he created based on the new characters’ actions, or what he imagined they might be thinking.
And then he would turn off sequestration, plug himself into the neuroscanner, and watch them again, receiving his own memories back with additions and embellishments and new thoughts.
The new memories made Jules a better writer.
More empathetic. And also more precise. He would test out storylines with these memories, see how they worked, if they made sense.
When they didn’t, he’d try again, layering on slightly different versions of the same events into his head.
Now when he thought back to his childhood, after soccer practice or a day at school, he remembered jumping over caverns, running from dragons, fighting trolls.
Not all memories were for story. Sometimes Jules just enjoyed things: wielding magic, flying, seducing beautiful women.
He spackled over his actual memories with these new ones, replacing drunken nights at bars with hours tutoring young magicians in training at a special school.
Instead of hopping on buses across a city he remembered a torrid romance with a devilish witch.
When he developed a crush on a farmer’s daughter he watched on the feeds, he replaced his college girlfriend with memories of the farm girl instead.
So he knew the crevices of her body, what it felt like to lie naked with her under the covers.
When the farmer’s daughter drowned in a pond, Jules retooled her fate in his memory so that she killed herself, so grief-stricken that Jules could not be with her she would rather die.
Jules never really met her, never saw her except on cameras, but he didn’t remember that anymore.
The process of loading his head with memories became second nature.
He could run the neuroscanner without fear of collapsing, sitting upright in his chair while keeping an eye on the camera feeds at the same time.
Eventually he could even record script notes as he uploaded scans, existing in the past, present, and future all at once.
“Jules, I am trying to talk to you.”
His name was strange now. Like an old dream, one you are jolted awake from and barely remember.
“Jules, please. I need more guidance here.”
The voice was Glenn’s. He knew that voice. Gregorian. Not Glenn, Gregorian. Jules was plastering those memories, too, replacing late-night rehearsals with adventures across the Malicarn. Gregorian was an old friend. He knew that.
“Hello,” he said to Glenn. To Gregorian. “How are you doing?”
“Christ, Jules, I’ve been here for an hour. Can you just let me know what you want me to tell the queen’s advisors when I go over there?”
Jules didn’t look at the voice. It was somewhere, over there, in the dark. He wanted it to go away.
“I am the Necromancer.”
“Yes, I know. What do I tell the advisors?”
Gregorian was going to have to learn to be more self-reliant. That was important. No more story sessions. He needed to be able to live free inside the story.
“You should handle the situation in the most effective way you know how,” Jules said.
“Yes, but what is that?”
“Do you remember Frederickson?”
“Professor Frederickson? Our drama teacher?”
“Do you remember affective memory? You have to relive a memory, to make it real. Tie it to some trigger and pull it out when you need it.”
“I’m impressed you actually remember that. But I’m not rehearsing for a scene, Jules. I need to know what the scene is.”
New memories: The Necromancer was born a regular child.
Poor but smart. His family was killed by marauders.
No, they were killed by a monster. No, he had no family.
An orphan? Sense of injustice at a young age.
Traveled to the Morlon Kastaun to learn the ways of the wizards, but shunted aside because of their snobbery.
Obvious? A bit. Comment on inequality by posing inequality as the origin of an evil man.
Maybe he is not evil. He is misunderstood.
Yes: Create a past where the heroes are actually villains. Can you make this story believable?
“We have some notes on the recent scripts.”
Gregorian was gone. Another voice. Another day? Hard to maintain the balance of time when your memories are always new.
“Clint in particular has concerns.”
Yes, a new voice. Larry Pine. On the video screen. Good. He wasn’t here. He couldn’t see the neuroscanner. Jules could’t let them know of it.
“Basically, we want to know if there’s any sort of long-term plan here. The shows are putting up decent streaming numbers but we need another movie. That’s the main thing. Is this getting tied together? What’s the plan?”
Jules pretended to listen. The notes were always the same: Feature popular characters. Less moral grayness, more heroes. Jules didn’t care. He wanted spectacle, real spectacle, and he could provide it.
“Oh, and there’s another thing. We’ve discussed the issue of the queen.”
“The queen?”
“Yes, you remember. We were split on whether we wanted the young queen in a more central role or not.”
“She’s nearly an adult now. I can start featuring her more—”
“No, no. We don’t want her. Look, it’s just that, nobody wants a cripple as the hero. Especially not a weak character like her. Prion was great, but it’s been sixteen years. We think you should introduce a new king and write out the queen. Make her evil or something.”
“Ah, a twist.”