FAILED PROJECT FRIDAY: Synopsis for an EMPOWERED cyberpunk SF one-shot, pt.1!

Failed-Project Friday returns without warning; Lordy loo!

This morning, 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"; I'll attach an early Empowered page depicting him, in case you'd forgotten the character. There he is in panel 2 below:

And now, without further ado, here's part 1 (of 2) of my synopsis for the long-defunct one-shot:

"EMPOWERED: BEAUTIFUL DYSTOPIA AND THE PLUMED MECHA-SERPENT"

(One-shot plot synopsis, pt.1)

YET ANOTHER APOCALYPSE: We open in media res as, once again, nighttime disaster strikes a downtown neighborhood in the unnamed city where Empowered is set. This time around, every material object within a half-mile-radius of the stricken region is suddenly and inexplicably transforming into a sleekly futuristic, science-fictional version of itself. The effect starts with the area's buildings, which rapidly morph from mundane, present-day urbanity to towering, wildly baroque icons of SF architecture; in fact, spawning—and visibly growing higher by the minute—at the disaster's epicenter is a monstrously cyclopean "arcology" megastructure, akin to Blade Runner's Tyrell pyramid or Bubblegum Crisis's equally ginormous Genom Tower. Down at street level, city traffic is transforming into a parade of Syd-Mead-worthy vehicles, some of which even take to the air; other cars and trucks are morphing into mecha of all descriptions, from human-patterned, Shirow-esque ersatz Landmates to heavily armed gunships and hovertanks.

STREET-LEVEL DISASTER: The real crisis, however, befalls the hapless civilians trapped within the affected region: They, too, are being futuristically transformed, much to their uncomprehending horror. Heads erupt with exotic alloys and plastics, in the form of cranial jacks, artificial eyes and cybernetic implants; weaponized protheses replace flesh-and-blood limbs; armor plates, antennae and sensor gear bristle forth from naked skin, a la Tetsuo: The Iron Man. We even see a dog being victimized, rapidly evolving into a robotic (Gibsonian!) "slamhound" even as its owner similarly (cyber-)succumbs.

HEROES IN HARM'S WAY: Thus, Empowered and the rest of her Superhomey teammates are busy with evacuating the panicking, transforming civilians out of the affected area; once removed from the radius of the mysterious "technofield," the victims' sudden cyber-augmentations slowly fade out of existence. Ah, but even superheroes aren't immune to the transformation effect… An annoyed Capitan Rivet finds his retro-style rivets morphing into ultra-tech gear; an alarmed Major Havoc sprouts an artificial eye (and, by off-panel implication, might shriek upon discovering his genitals morphed into, ahem, a Tetsuo-style "cybertool"); even blobby, globby Protean grows a host of useless mechanical parts. Retreating, Rivet notes that no nanoware infection has been detected; whatever triggered this disaster is, it seems, not a conventionally understood form of technology.

IMMUNITY TIMES TWO: While the rest of the team is forced to flee the technofield's inexorable, slowly spreading effects, two Superhomeys remain unaffected. One is—of course—Empowered, whose flimsy but glitteringly unearthly "supersuit" yet again repels an attempt to "technoinfect" her. The other is the mysterious “Mechzalcóatl,” a giant, winged, snake-shaped mecha apparently patterned after the “feathered serpent” form of the Aztec deity Quetzalcóatl. As fast as technofield-spawned deformities develop in his metal carapace, the mutable Mechzalcóatl is able to quickly reincorporate them into his mass. Note: Emp knows very little about her teammate other than his puzzling speech patterns, which are an alien combination of both machine-language symbols and “cyber-pictographic” characters representing a bizarre dialect of Nahuatl, the Aztec language. (She—or the reader, at least—will soon learn a great deal more about this enigmatic beastie.)

REVERSE THE TECHNOCURSE: The rescue phase of the operation wraps up as a frantic Emp resorts to grabbing fast-mutating civilians and flinging them out of the technofield’s reach; cue a superpowered riff on the manga trope of “catching falling plates of food,” as Protean’s globby mass catches a dozen Emp-flung civilians in rapid succession. Now, alas, the remaining civilians are far too cyber-mutated for Emp to dare remove them from the affected area; scanning their bodies with her supersuit’s handy-dandy lenses, she determines them too far gone to be evacuated. Emp decides that, to save the cyborged citizenry, she must journey to the technosphere’s epicenter and try to reverse the mysterious infestation. Aiding this decision is the fact that the cybermorphed civvies have now turned on our heroine, implacably attacking with armed prostheses straight out of the Cyberpunk RPG’s weapons charts. Why, Emp even finds out why “slamhounds” are named thusly... Cue the sound FX “SLAMM,” as a newly hostile dogbot bowls her over.

IN THE AIR TONIGHT: Emp climbs aboard Mechzalcóatl and they take to the air, soaring up to the vast arcology “megastructure” spawning at the center of the infestation. On the way up, Emp spots something familiar about the setting’s derivatively Mead-ian architecture and its pervasive Japanese (but not Chinese) influence in signage and symbols... Then she remembers getting ignominiously captured by one “Digital Daimyo Zero,” a doughy, aging, pot-smoking technovillain obsessed with the late-80s-era cyberpunk that the reconfigured city now evokes.

HOSTAGE FLASHBACK: Cut to a scene of duct-taped Emp held captive at Digital Daimyo Zero’s decidedly low-rent lair, an office rental above an amazingly noisy karaoke bar; not coincidentally, Emp notes, that very building would’ve been roughly at the epicenter of tonight’s expanding technofield. Between bong hits of medical marijuana, he raved about bootstrapping a “Wintermute-level AI”—whatever that meant—into sentience and starting a glorious techno-revolution, but seemed to have made little progress with the homebrewed, jerryrigged AI core he’d assembled. (“He also raved ENDLESSLY about his strong likes and dislikes in science fiction,” Emp recalls sourly. “I’ve never been more relieved in my life to escape a villain’s lair.”) Now, she muses, Digital Daimyo Zero might be fulfilling his dreams of a Japanese-flavored cyberpunk future—a “retrofuture,” really, given the decades that have passed since cyberpunk’s heyday and Japan’s imminent demographic collapse. Note: The otherwise inscrutable Mechzalcóatl flinches at the mention of the term “retrofuture,” which refers to a nostalgic, counterfactual vision of an imagined future that will never exist; the term usually refers to visions of SF futures from before 1960 or so, but here its meaning has been broadened quite a bit.)

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. 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.

TO BE CONTINUED!

(Note, BTW, that Mechzalcóatl's "belly bombardment" mecha riff was inspired by a scene from 1991's Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels; when I get a chance, I'll dig up the relevant DP pages and post 'em along with the rest of the synposis.)

Anyhoo, on some future Friday, I'll finish off the synopsis and reveal the project's rather tragic punchline. Yay!

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Ehh, next Monday will very likely feature another excerpt from the Dirty Pair--nay, "Rose & Lily" story in proto-Empowered format that I've been serializing for the fine folks of the $5 Patron tiers and higher. (Seriously, $3 tier supporters, you've missed out on a ton of commissioned comic pages posted for the $5 tiers over the years this Patreon's been active.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON FOR THE BIGGER SPENDERS: The fine folks of the $10 & $20 tiers will get their Monthly Exclusive Bonus post either over the weekend or by Monday, January 31st at the latest. (Will likely be another Empowered vol.12 sneak peek, I imagine.)