#WritingFromIsolationWard
Author: NiteMayr
Before:
Kevin was born on the mossy hills of Scotland and lived for a while in West Lothian before the mores of pre-Thatcher and REALLY pre-Oasis Great Britain sent his family across the ocean to North America. They moved here and there and Kevin did the same when he was old enough. Now he lives in London with his family and a Dog.
Kevin Wardrop is an amateur writer, amateur photographer and professional pain in the ass. He has worked in the PC support business for most of his adult life and has been accustomed to simply answering technical questions as a matter of fiat, it was his career choice after all. Now he herds cats and puppies for a living as well as babysitting the web enterprises at the heart of western industry.
Last night a person who was a fixture in the lives of Gen-X in Kincardine, passed away. Tim Chamberlain was a familiar sight around town in the 80s and 90s you’d see him in his sleek chair or motorized scooter. We didn’t stay close, I don’t know if anyone did.
He’s gone.
He leaves behind an army of friends who wished him all the best, even when he didn’t seem to want it for himself. There are those among us who he was even more special for who are going to hurt all the greater. We knew he was a brief candle, like Kurt Cobain or Janis Joplin.
But he wasn’t like them.
He grew up, he took responsibility he raised his kids. He was a Dad who did Dad Stuff. Like I said, we weren’t close anymore, but I know he was still doing “Dad Stuff” as recently as Christmas time, I have my ways.
Tim was a big personality, I remember the disappointment that was left in his wake among the parents, because they loved him too. He wasn’t living the life they wanted him to live, he was living his life on his terms and we loved him for it.
He had physical limitations.
They never kept him down for long. In a way I’m glad that I’m not facing this news alone, because while I knew this day would come, I hoped I wouldn’t ever see it while I was still young enough to say “He was gone too soon”
Because Tim is Gone too soon.
Back in the late 90s and Early 2000s, before there was a Matrix Sequel or even “The Animatrix” there was just “The Matrix” and what we knew about the world of it from that first movie. It was full of the promise that “anyone” could be have super powers in the Matrix and that all it took was being “shown the way”
Well, I took that idea and ran with it. The Premise [in the RPG] was that a famous former Superman actor had received cutting edge nano-tech treatments for his spinal injury, allowing him to walk again and the tech became widely available to the point that humans commonly had enhancements to their bodies. This led to a singularity of humanity and machine where machine intelligence was born and became independent from human intelligence.
Machines had typically been slaves to humans and humanity (for the most part) wanted that to continue, but the Machines had their own goals, emotions and needs now. They were a new mode of being, purely software in any shell they could imagine. It was wonderful for the new machines, but humanity was envious of the freedom of the machine children and war broke out and “the plot of the Matrix” happened.
I don’t recall where the idea of multiple Matrixes came from, but the premise was that the “real world” in the Movie was less desolate, but that humanity was pushed mostly to “the moon” and the war between Humanity and the Machines had pushed those with the resources to do it to leave earth for the “the moon” and so Humans had to hold orbital launch stations at the poles to allow for resources to be dropped to the core.
Also, “The Matrix” that we saw in the Movie was just “That Matrix” and there were others, some with Magic, Some with Superheroes, Some with Cowboys, the premise being the GM could set the story in a Matrix with rules they could set and give the players different things to do other than “Be Neo”
I ended up scrapping it, especially after the other movies came out, I changed the title to “The Sequence” after the initial code snippet that “turned on” Machine intelligence and left it to lie
I don’t even know what happened to the manuscript at this point, it’s somewhere on a disk.
I did get it printed and bound though, since I had access to the means, along with a book of poems I wrote while working the phones for “Teh Nortons”
