Tinfoil, Christmas lights & a massive drainage pipe

Blazing Reader,

Last post, I told how I played the role of an elderly nuclear physicist in a high school production of The Pink Panther Strikes Again (way back in 1995). The "doomsday machine" my character was forced to invent was actually something I volunteered to build in real life — after the prop department presented us with some Christmas lights strung around a coat rack as a weapon capable of vaporizing the UN headquarters.

So, I convinced a teacher with a big pickup truck to drive me and the assistant director out to a construction site on the edge of town, where I asked the crew if they had any loose ends we might haul away for them. We left with a massive corrugated drainage pipe.

Then I convinced the shop teacher to get his class to build a wooden frame on wheels that would point the pipe on an angle, like a cannon.

Next, I pestered the computer lab teacher to borrow one of his unused PCs. I wrote some software in GW Basic — that produced meaningless graphs, streams of pointless data and a flashing "self-destruct" message — and duct-taped that old cathode-ray monochrome monitor to the front of the frame.

Then I, and another actor, spent a weekend covering the frame with cardboard and tinfoil, giving the "cannon" a blue paint job and converting those Christmas lights into a flickering control panel.

I remember the assistant director shaking her head and saying, "Why are you doing this? It's so much work. Why don't we keep it simple?"

We ignored her and she went away to demoralize someone else.

But nobody was complaining when the dress rehearsals started. We rolled that monster on stage and the entire cast was in awe. Undeniably, it looked like a cheesy prop from a B-movie. But that was part of its glory. It renewed everyone's enthusiasm for a play we'd rehearsed a hundred times.

If you want to keep things simple, don't get out of bed. But if you want to have a life where you create wonderful things, uplift people and have an adventure, then it's going to take some work. But at least when you find yourself on your deathbed you won't be looking back thinking, "I really wish I had built that doomsday machine."

For example, I've been working on my forthcoming novella, All the Humans are Sleeping, going on twenty years. I've rewritten and edited it at least thirty times. Set in Northern Norway after a nuclear war, it's involved researching everything from radioactive fallout to midnight suns to local fauna to Sámi (a language spoken by five thousand people in Northern Scandinavia). Nothing simple about writing a grand story.

Last post, I also promised I'd share another snippet from the novella. Here's a scene with the diabolical Secretary-General of the United Nations:

“Humanity, like any criminal guilty of unforgivable crimes, has lost its rights,” explained the secretary. “The metaverse will serve as a well-deserved prison.”

“Crimes?” asked the robot.

Guillermo laughed. “Countless crimes! We’ve polluted the earth with our avarice, nearly destroyed it with our wars. Technology has allowed us to rape nature of her oil and precious minerals. Even among our own greedy species we had a billion people starving to death, while another billion ate themselves into obesity. We are a cancer to this planet. The metaverse has provided a way to remove the tumour of humanity painlessly, once and for all. It will allow us to live out the remainder of our self-centred existence in a hedonistic paradise we have all secretly aspired to — without reproducing and perpetuating our insanity into future generations.”

“Forgive me for saying, sir,” responded Domestico, slowly, “this sounds like genocide.”

“And not a moment too soon,” countered the secretary.

Sadly, All the Humans are Sleeping isn't coming soon enough for me. I'm aiming now for January 1st. If you haven't already, become a subscriber to be alerted when it's ready (if you don't subscribe, I have a tinfoil covered doomsday machine I'll be aiming at your home).

— John C. A. Manley

PS And if you missed the last post about how I was kidnapped and forced to vaporize the United Nations Headquarters, you can still read it here.

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/