Liner Notes for God Machine Prison Break
****
Are liner notes superfluous? God Machine Prison Break explains everything I intend to explain about TetraHedron, answers every question I thought worthwhile about the serial. Offers some introductory explanation for 200,000 years of human history and pre-history. Puts forward some thoughts about deliberate editing of oneself to become a different person. What more is there to say?
Perhaps there’s a little. I always knew there was something inside the TetraHedron, and that would be, if not the central mystery, at least a driver of the plot. I had in my notes the words ‘bitch goddess’ and I did not know who that was or what they wanted or why they were there but it was clearly who was in the middle, trapped by four dimensional gates. Answers are often less interesting than questions so she is a mere sketch.
The bottleneck in early human numbers is a scientific theory, the cause and the reason for the survival of the few hundred who made it through owe more to speculation. Still more speculative is my proposal that nomadic peoples would periodically come together for one purpose or another. Nevertheless the periodic eruption of horse-peoples from the Eurasian steppe, led by a charismatic leader, and the scattering of burial mounds and elaborate ritual sites in Siberia suggest that hunter gatherer bands can and will create larger, more complex groups. Complicating this picture is that pastoralist nomadism requires advanced technologies, often developed by more sedentary peoples. I’ve done my best to offer an overview of this topic in my action-adventure two-fisted space opera story.
The concept of editing yourself to become a better patroller is supposed to link into the Novapolis habit of making people into weapons, but it was awkward when they said it directly so that’s just sub-text.
My stated intention for the Deep Patrol stories was what if Star Trek but the people knew that going to a gangster planet and a Greek god planet and a salt-sucking desert monster planet (spoilers, sorry) over a three week period is pretty strange? There’s an implied intentionality to it that never comes up. Meanwhile, problem of the week, fistfights, chases, explosions, weird science puzzles etc.
And so an ending but one that opens up rather than closing down. Gunn, already in trouble, will have to face a court of enquiry at least. Yet he knows more about the TetraHedron and the bitch goddess than anyone else. And even if they took him off them for his failures, the Deep Patrol has a pragmatic core. They’ll have a use for a patroller in disgrace, for the jobs that no one else will do, that people with more to lose would avoid.
More two-fisted space ranger adventures anon.
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