FAILED PROJECT FRIDAY: Synopsis for an EMPOWERED cyberpunk SF one-shot, pt.2!

(Our previous installment can be read here, by the way.)

Recently, I was pawing through a bunch of old Word files trying to unearth a (still-)missing portion of the prose experiment I Am Empowered when I spied an old synopsis for an abortive Empowered Guest Artist one-shot, which I decided would make for an amusing (if brief) revival of Failed-Project Friday.

See, back in 2013, I was pondering the idea of doing an Empowered Guest artist one-shot that would've been drawn by the great writer/artist Giannis Milonogiannis, whose cyberpunk SF bona fides were well-established by projects such as his Shirow-influenced (and recently optioned, IIRC) series Old City Blues and even a Ghost in the Shell story.

I worked up a pitch that would've leaned very, very hard indeed into the idea of classic 80s/90s-era cyberpunk SF as a "retrofuture." Alas, the proposal soon foundered for a pretty mundane reason: I couldn't fit the story's narrative adequately into a single issue. I may well have intended to expand the pitch into a multiple-issue format with more pagecount, but (I assume in retrospect) Giannis' brief window of availability had probably closed by then.

As you'll see in the conclusion of this serialized synopsis for the pitch, the one-shot's SF-skewing story would've tied in to the origin of the mysterious, robotic-winged-serpent Superhomey referred to as "Mechzalcóatl":

And now, without further ado, here's part 2 (of 2) of my synopsis for the long-defunct one-shot:

"EMPOWERED: BEAUTIFUL DYSTOPIA AND THE PLUMED MECHA-SERPENT" (continued)

THE UNFRIENDLY SKIES: When our heroes are targeted by hostile gunships spawning from the rising rooftops, the plumed mecha-serpent flaunts his own superior firepower: dozens of weapon hatches open up all along his belly, unleashing a broadside—well, underside—barrage of laserfire that hoses down the enemy. 

[Note: the preceding paragraph was an homage of sorts to the serpentine Kuan Yin mecha gunship I designed for the miniseries Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels, as seen below:

Well, this version rocked lasers and not missiles, but whatevs.]

Meanwhile, Emp glances up at a sudden flare of light in the sky overhead, uses her mask’s image-enhancing lenses, then glimpses an impossible image of that familiar staple of Japanese cyberpunk: A laser-armed satellite, replying with its own high-energy bombardment from what appears to be orbit. (Surreally, the lasersat seems to be both in orbit and only a half-mile overhead at the same time.) Emp gets only a moment of spluttering about impossible orbital tracks, inverse-square laws and all the other real-life mundanities that make anime lasersats unfeasible before, oops, poor Mechzalcóatl gets hammered by the implausible bombardment.

CHROME SERPENT DOWN: Much of the mecha-serpent’s mass is instantly vaporized, but the horrifically damaged “Mechzal”—fortunately with wings still partially intact—and a shrieking Emp manage to crash-land on the arcology’s roof after a vertiginous plunge. The wrecked mecha hastily reworks and reshapes his remaining chassis into a much smaller-scale version of himself before our heroes move onward—and downward—into the arcology. Action ensues, needless to say, as Emp and the newly “fun-sized” Mechzalcóatl must fight their way through wave after wave of violent cyberpunk tropes while they journey to the center of the technosphere...

CYBERTROPES AHOY: Molecule-thin “mollywire” flying hither and yon, slicing everything to shreds! Curvily feminine, Hajime-Sorayama-esque hardsuits and brawny, Boomer-like masculine mecha! Minigun-armed hoverbikes straight outta Akira or Megazone 23 pt.2! Ersatz, gun-and-katana-wielding “street samurai” and vats disgorging hordes of, well, vatgrown ninja! A strange prevalence of caseless ammo and fully automatic shotguns! (The cyberpunk community was waaaay too impressed with the fruitless prototypes of the US Army’s 80s-era Advanced Combat Rifle and Close Assault Weapons System programs, IMHO.) Emp entangled and menaced by an animated barrage of coiled-cord interface cables—a riff from my own oeuvre, natch—in a scene that hints of anime’s icky tentacular invasion trope! (Emp “vorpps” herself free well before matters get too creepy, though.) 

More slamhounds, slotted to Emp’s pheromones just like in Count Zero’s first paragraph, sniff her out and attack! Gotta somehow work in a Patrick Nagel reference, since Nagel-ish imagery was nigh-inescapable in 80s-era American cyberpunk illustrations! Plus, my personal bête noire from the period: Cyber-enhanced “rockerboys” a la John Shirley, hailing from an imagined future where guitar-slinging white guys are somehow still the epitome of cool! (Okay, that last riff could be a bit of a stretch.)

NARRATIVE CAPTIONS AHOY? An interesting possibility might be that Emp can “overhear” Digital Daimyo Zero’s cyberpunk-flavored rambles echoing through the technofield as muddled, stream-of-consciousness narrative captions, heavily laden with neologisms and technobabble. (After all, narrative captions are undeniably God’s gift—or “weakly Godlike AI’s gift,” if you prefer—to writers working on SF comics.) These might turn out to just be recordings, though, as we’ll soon see.

[Note: Years later, I wound up using this "stream of techy consciousness" riff for a dying Manny's ramblings in the final act of Empowered vol.9.] 

CONSENSUALLY HALLUCINATORY? As Emp and Mechzalcóatl reach the arcology’s core, another interesting possibility might be that its internal architecture recreates the geometric abstractions of a Gibsonian vision of “cyberspace.” (Arguably, Gibson’s concepts of a Tron-ish VR cyberspace might be the least-gracefully-aged aspects of Neuromancer, though Your Mileage May Vary on this topic.)

THE REVEAL: Our heroes emerge into the arcology’s inner sanctum, only to find Digital Daimyo Zero sprawled on the floor, apparently dead of natural causes, still-smoldering bong in hand. Beside him is the homebrewed, jerryrigged AI core that Emp saw in the earlier flashback—but it squats amidst pentagrams and candles and ancient-looking tomes, alongside wands and crystal balls and scrawled Enochian symbols. Yeahp, ol’ Digital Daimyo never quite bootstrapped his pet project into full, “Wintermute-level” sentience, but the failed AI core clearly grew quite adept at running “magical spells” on its hardware. (Might be able to tie this into the Charles Stross Laundry Files theory that magic is nothing but exotic mathematics applied in a dimension-altering form, by the way.) “So he used magic to create a hard science-fiction scenario?” Emp ponders querulously. “Well, that’s kinda different...”

As another Emp-vision scan reveals, Digital Daimyo Zero was dying of pancreatic cancer, hence all the medical marijuana he was toking during her earlier flashback (to alleviate chemotherapeutic side effects). He dragged himself out of his hospice bed and back to his lair, where he made one last attempt to magically spawn the “beautiful dystopia” of a cyberpunk “retrofuture” that he would never live to see, finally croaking while the failed AI core was still booting up its magic-using software.

“So, um, now what?” Emp asks, eyeing the still-running AI core. “Should I just vorpp the stupid thing, or—” Mechzalcóatl answers her question by unhinging his jaw and abruptly swallowing the AI core whole, just like a flesh-and-blood snake devouring its prey; the mecha’s ultra-tech innards quickly absorb the core, and begin counteracting its cyberpunk-enacting spells. Well, sorta... Cut ahead in time to Emp and Mechzalcóatl back out on the street, where the dazed civilians have transformed back to their human forms; however, only the organic forms of humans—and dogs!—have reverted, while the rest of the affected area’s restructured buildings, Syd-Mead-y cars and new-spawned mecha remain locked in futuristic form. “Ehh, whatevs,” Emp shrugs. “This’ll have to do, I guess.”

THE MECHZALCÓATL REVEAL: Ah, but as our heroes depart the scene, we get one more flashback—or, technically, a flash-forward—that reveals the untold background of Emp’s mysterious teammate. Via colorful mashup of Aztec and cyberpunk iconongraphy, we discover that Mechzalcóatl is actually a refugee from a very different “retrofuture.” Instead of hailing from Gibson’s BAMA Sprawl or anime’s Neo/ MegaTokyo, he’s a sentient mecha created in the urban megalopolis—nay, mega-altepetl (Aztec for “city-state”)—of Nuevo Tenochtitlán. (Bit of a tribute, here, to Ernest Hogan’s sadly overlooked “Aztecan SF” novels.) He traveled back in time to the present-day Empverse to prevent a civilization-ending technological disaster, and succeeded—only to discover that he’d accidentally “butterfly-effected” the causal chain that would’ve made his native timeframe possible. Now poor Mechzalcóatl is permanently trapped in Emp’s present day, unable to return to a future doomed to never exist in the form he once knew.

“Gotta love these goofy-ass retrofutures, huh?” Emp says to Mechzalcóatl, who replies with one last noncommittal burst of mingled machine code and Nuevo-Nahuatl pictograms...

THE END.

That's all, folks!

For the record, I was kinda ripping myself off with the final reveal about Mechzalcóatl, as I had an entire SF comic pitch, Live Free or Die, based on the concept of refugees from now-impossible futures and their failed efforts to manipulate the present-day timeline. Like most of my proposals, that one came to naught, but you may actually have met at least a few of Live Free or Die's characters, as I turned a few of 'em (and their powersets) into some of the mecha in Marvel's Livewires, aka "Unnamed Robot Comic" on this here Patreon.

Gotta say that I have no intention of ever doing any more Empowered Guest Artist projects, but might someday try to get some one-off superhero-adjacent projects rolling with other artists, so who knows? Some version of this story might someday see print, though I rather doubt it.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure, TBH, but I'd assume one of next week's posts will be continuing serialization (for the $5+ tiers) of the early-2000s commissioned damsel-in-distress comic "Rose & Lily vs. Troops."