08-11-2005, 07:03 PM
Helen and I had been talking about writing some "Tales of the Warriors" together a few months ago. The first story was going to be how Doug joined the Warriors, but the whole project seems to have stalled. I came across the opening I wrote for that story just this morning, and I figured, well, what the hell. If we pick the project up again, it'll be a good teaser, and if we don't, well, people still get to enjoy it.
So here you go: call it teaser or fragment or what have you:
Disclaimer and credits will be found after the end of the chapter. TALES OF THE WARRIORS: DOUGLAS SANGNOIR AND THE OVERLONG PROBATION by Helen E. Imre and Robert M. Schroeck1. I Never Metapunk I Didn't LikeI wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. -- Gilda RadnerAll created beings are unmanifest in their beginning, manifest in their interim state, and unmanifest again when they are annihilated. So what need is there for lamentation? -- Bhagavad Gita (c. 400 BC)Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. -- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheThe beginning is actually sort of the middle.The *real* beginning is in 1962, or maybe 1957. Or maybe 1929, but that's actually the beginning for a whole lot of other people who aren't really part of this story, and going back that far just means I'll have to ignore their stories anyway, so let's not do that, okay?(1929, in case you weren't paying attention at all during your elementary and high school history classes, is The Year The People With Powers Appeared. Or, as the historians prefer, The Metahuman Explosion. It wasn't actually anything like an explosion -- more like a slowly rising tide. But like I said, that's not the story I'm telling.)1957 is the year my parents met, and that *is* the story I'mtelling. Or part of it anyway. My dad is Peter William Sangnoir. My mom calls him "Petey".My mom is Jessamyn Lorraine Sangnoir. Dad calls her "Jess", and sometimes "Cowgirl" when he wants to tease her. (She's been an equestrian -- as close to the polar opposite of a cowgirl as you can get and still be on a horse -- since she was something like 8 or 10.)They're both of French extraction, although my grandmother on Mom's side was a German Jew who got out of Germany before it got completely locked down by the Nazis. Bubbe had quite a few stories to tell about her life, and I was always an eager listener.Anyway. My parents met in college -- UCLA. Dad always said that he met Mom when he found her passed out drunk at a frat party. He carried her home to his dorm room, and she never left. Mom usually hit him on the arm at that point and then said that they had actually been introduced by one of her sorority sisters. Since just which sister had done the introducing never seemed to be the same in any two tellings of the story, I have to wonder if Dad isn't the one who told the truth, and Mom gave me the tall tale, contrary to the expected division of labor.However they met, they apparently hit it off because after Mom graduated in 1959 they got married, and three years later they had me: Douglas Quincy Sangnoir, named for my two grandfathers. Obnoxiously rich, blonde native Californian. A genuine Beverly Hills Baby.Oh, and I'm a metahuman. * * *The beginning that's also the middle is 1984. One of the things that it was the middle of was the year. It was June.I'd just graduated from college -- Princeton, BSE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, specializing in cybernetics and robotics. Magna cum laude, too, thanks to a mutant boost in brainpower that let me read my textbooks once in September and then ace exams for an entire year. (No, I don't think that's an unfair advantage. I was born with it, it's mine, and I didn't break any rules to use it. Besides, most people are *real* squeamish about saying human beings can only be so smart before they stop being human beings. They quickly realize it's sort of like one of those height requirement signs at an amusement park -- "You must be at least this stupid to be a normal human". When it's phrased like that, the idea upsets a lot of people. They'd rather think of normals as having the chance of being another Einstein or Tsung than limit them to being the intellectual brothers of Homer Simpson.But I digress. Again.)In the early 1980s, corporate recruiting during spring semester at an Ivy League school was sort of like being in the major league football draft, especially for someone with my engineering degree, my grades and my collection of bleeding edge research and projects. I had, by my sophomore year, learned enough about my metatalents that with sufficient concentration I could "nudge" my field sufficiently to let me work safely with the electronics that were part and parcel of my chosen studies. (Although my field did "get even" for it whenever it could. The time that I got kicked out of Dean Jahn's "PEAR" psi lab when the TK test rig started spewing ping-pong balls all over the place was one of the more extreme cases; fortunately it never entered my transcripts.)Several corporations courted me throughout the Spring of 1984; in the end, I let RCA recruit me. They were prestigious, they paid well, and most importantly they were local -- the Sarnoff campus was less than three miles from my senior year dorm room. This mattered because I totally loved the Princeton area, and because it kept me 3000 miles from my parents. I'd grown increasingly estranged from them as I passed through my teens. The effort and stress of suppressing the worst of my metagifts' early side effects had left me distant and emotionally exhausted, and this in turn had eroded my relationship with them.Not to mention that my burgeoning sense of political and philosophical awareness did *not* dovetail with their own leanings.So being as I was legally an adult, I dipped into my trust fund for a couple hundred thou and bought myself a house in a pleasant area not too far from the University campus. With the change from that purchase I picked up a nice little sportscar -- nothing too extreme, as I had distressingly "common" tastes even then, just a nice little Corvette Stingray. Bright red, of course. And starting a week after graduation I drove it every day to RCA and back again. I was just a glorified lab assistant, but it felt good to actually be *doing* something with my skills other than racking up grades. I'd be helping develop new technologies that would change the world! Contributing to vital research! I'd co-author some papers, maybe, and climb up the ladder of advancement with blazing speed!I didn't get what I had wanted and expected.RCA might have been the source of dozens, maybe hundreds of technological innovations that had shaped the world as much as the presence of metahumans like myself had, but it was still a hierarchy -- an old and established one, with its high priests at the top jealously protecting their jobs and their special spheres of interest. Someone like me -- young, exuberant, iconoclastic and ready to blow away their fossilized, stale procedures and traditions -- well, they had ways of dealing with someone like me when I bucked the system too much. They didn't want to get rid of me -- firing me would would have cost them money and profits, since I was already improving and innovating on the projects to which I'd been assigned. They were happy with that -- but not with my "attitude". They wanted to break me into the RCA way of doing things.I don't take kindly to breaking.I toughed it out for almost a year. But when I was relegated to "contributor" status on both a paper I'd written completely myself and on a patent application for the widget I'd invented and about which I'd written the paper, that was it. I didn't care that it was "standard" procedure in both the Labs and academia for "assistants" like me to end up "also by"'s on their own work, for which their advisor/mentor/supervisor took primary credit. All I saw was that I was being cheated. I confronted my supervisor and was told I had no say in the matter. My employment contract made anything I created on their time theirs, I'd known it when I signed, and so I had no complaint coming.I quit on the spot.It wasn't like I needed the job, anyway. My needs were simple --despite my expensive house and fancy car I was practically an ascetic, mostly because I still lived like a college student. With that kind of lifestyle I could have survived on the interest from my trust fund alone for decades without even coming close to touching the principal.
And that's all that exists for the moment. More may be forthcoming if Helen and I get our collaboration rebooted, but for the moment, this is the entirety of the project's output that I know of.
I hope you enjoyed it.
-- Bob
---------
It's spelt "Frodo Baggins" but it's pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove."
So here you go: call it teaser or fragment or what have you:
Disclaimer and credits will be found after the end of the chapter. TALES OF THE WARRIORS: DOUGLAS SANGNOIR AND THE OVERLONG PROBATION by Helen E. Imre and Robert M. Schroeck1. I Never Metapunk I Didn't LikeI wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. -- Gilda RadnerAll created beings are unmanifest in their beginning, manifest in their interim state, and unmanifest again when they are annihilated. So what need is there for lamentation? -- Bhagavad Gita (c. 400 BC)Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. -- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheThe beginning is actually sort of the middle.The *real* beginning is in 1962, or maybe 1957. Or maybe 1929, but that's actually the beginning for a whole lot of other people who aren't really part of this story, and going back that far just means I'll have to ignore their stories anyway, so let's not do that, okay?(1929, in case you weren't paying attention at all during your elementary and high school history classes, is The Year The People With Powers Appeared. Or, as the historians prefer, The Metahuman Explosion. It wasn't actually anything like an explosion -- more like a slowly rising tide. But like I said, that's not the story I'm telling.)1957 is the year my parents met, and that *is* the story I'mtelling. Or part of it anyway. My dad is Peter William Sangnoir. My mom calls him "Petey".My mom is Jessamyn Lorraine Sangnoir. Dad calls her "Jess", and sometimes "Cowgirl" when he wants to tease her. (She's been an equestrian -- as close to the polar opposite of a cowgirl as you can get and still be on a horse -- since she was something like 8 or 10.)They're both of French extraction, although my grandmother on Mom's side was a German Jew who got out of Germany before it got completely locked down by the Nazis. Bubbe had quite a few stories to tell about her life, and I was always an eager listener.Anyway. My parents met in college -- UCLA. Dad always said that he met Mom when he found her passed out drunk at a frat party. He carried her home to his dorm room, and she never left. Mom usually hit him on the arm at that point and then said that they had actually been introduced by one of her sorority sisters. Since just which sister had done the introducing never seemed to be the same in any two tellings of the story, I have to wonder if Dad isn't the one who told the truth, and Mom gave me the tall tale, contrary to the expected division of labor.However they met, they apparently hit it off because after Mom graduated in 1959 they got married, and three years later they had me: Douglas Quincy Sangnoir, named for my two grandfathers. Obnoxiously rich, blonde native Californian. A genuine Beverly Hills Baby.Oh, and I'm a metahuman. * * *The beginning that's also the middle is 1984. One of the things that it was the middle of was the year. It was June.I'd just graduated from college -- Princeton, BSE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, specializing in cybernetics and robotics. Magna cum laude, too, thanks to a mutant boost in brainpower that let me read my textbooks once in September and then ace exams for an entire year. (No, I don't think that's an unfair advantage. I was born with it, it's mine, and I didn't break any rules to use it. Besides, most people are *real* squeamish about saying human beings can only be so smart before they stop being human beings. They quickly realize it's sort of like one of those height requirement signs at an amusement park -- "You must be at least this stupid to be a normal human". When it's phrased like that, the idea upsets a lot of people. They'd rather think of normals as having the chance of being another Einstein or Tsung than limit them to being the intellectual brothers of Homer Simpson.But I digress. Again.)In the early 1980s, corporate recruiting during spring semester at an Ivy League school was sort of like being in the major league football draft, especially for someone with my engineering degree, my grades and my collection of bleeding edge research and projects. I had, by my sophomore year, learned enough about my metatalents that with sufficient concentration I could "nudge" my field sufficiently to let me work safely with the electronics that were part and parcel of my chosen studies. (Although my field did "get even" for it whenever it could. The time that I got kicked out of Dean Jahn's "PEAR" psi lab when the TK test rig started spewing ping-pong balls all over the place was one of the more extreme cases; fortunately it never entered my transcripts.)Several corporations courted me throughout the Spring of 1984; in the end, I let RCA recruit me. They were prestigious, they paid well, and most importantly they were local -- the Sarnoff campus was less than three miles from my senior year dorm room. This mattered because I totally loved the Princeton area, and because it kept me 3000 miles from my parents. I'd grown increasingly estranged from them as I passed through my teens. The effort and stress of suppressing the worst of my metagifts' early side effects had left me distant and emotionally exhausted, and this in turn had eroded my relationship with them.Not to mention that my burgeoning sense of political and philosophical awareness did *not* dovetail with their own leanings.So being as I was legally an adult, I dipped into my trust fund for a couple hundred thou and bought myself a house in a pleasant area not too far from the University campus. With the change from that purchase I picked up a nice little sportscar -- nothing too extreme, as I had distressingly "common" tastes even then, just a nice little Corvette Stingray. Bright red, of course. And starting a week after graduation I drove it every day to RCA and back again. I was just a glorified lab assistant, but it felt good to actually be *doing* something with my skills other than racking up grades. I'd be helping develop new technologies that would change the world! Contributing to vital research! I'd co-author some papers, maybe, and climb up the ladder of advancement with blazing speed!I didn't get what I had wanted and expected.RCA might have been the source of dozens, maybe hundreds of technological innovations that had shaped the world as much as the presence of metahumans like myself had, but it was still a hierarchy -- an old and established one, with its high priests at the top jealously protecting their jobs and their special spheres of interest. Someone like me -- young, exuberant, iconoclastic and ready to blow away their fossilized, stale procedures and traditions -- well, they had ways of dealing with someone like me when I bucked the system too much. They didn't want to get rid of me -- firing me would would have cost them money and profits, since I was already improving and innovating on the projects to which I'd been assigned. They were happy with that -- but not with my "attitude". They wanted to break me into the RCA way of doing things.I don't take kindly to breaking.I toughed it out for almost a year. But when I was relegated to "contributor" status on both a paper I'd written completely myself and on a patent application for the widget I'd invented and about which I'd written the paper, that was it. I didn't care that it was "standard" procedure in both the Labs and academia for "assistants" like me to end up "also by"'s on their own work, for which their advisor/mentor/supervisor took primary credit. All I saw was that I was being cheated. I confronted my supervisor and was told I had no say in the matter. My employment contract made anything I created on their time theirs, I'd known it when I signed, and so I had no complaint coming.I quit on the spot.It wasn't like I needed the job, anyway. My needs were simple --despite my expensive house and fancy car I was practically an ascetic, mostly because I still lived like a college student. With that kind of lifestyle I could have survived on the interest from my trust fund alone for decades without even coming close to touching the principal.
And that's all that exists for the moment. More may be forthcoming if Helen and I get our collaboration rebooted, but for the moment, this is the entirety of the project's output that I know of.
I hope you enjoyed it.
-- Bob
---------
It's spelt "Frodo Baggins" but it's pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove."