We're Too Rich To Die!

Slate has this "is this the end of Star Wars" article up today and I wanted to mention it briefly before I go help a user with something... Although I'm not a fan of what Star Wars has become, I don't think the end is anytime soon. Simply put, it's too big of a juggernaut to just roll over and die - this week, or next, this year or next - they'll still be stumbling along 20 years from now and you can quote me.

When you get to be big enough, your own personal wealth and brand power transcend a person's opinion. Given enough money and slick marketing, any bad product can continue to perform profitably in this market - just look at Ford and GM. Bad quarters, layoff 100,000 people? No problem! We'll be back next year -- we're too rich to die! Star Wars has become the Ford of sci-fi and the GM of pop culture. Everyone knows they could be doing better but they've become too large and too much of a big company to be out there on the cutting edge. You can't manage your way to the creativity that launched the original Model T or the Millennium Falcon - those ideas were created in a place that first built a box around itself and said "Management - STAY OUT".

But what do you do when you become the big cheese? How do you get to start over again? I'm not trying to be smart or rhetorical -- I would genuinely like to know.

More Novel News

78K words, folks - 78,000 words. I'm still trying to crank as much as I can and I want to get this draft complete as quickly as I can. I'm still keen to show you what it is that I have been doing and ignoring all updates here to accomplish. Thanks for your patience.

Flotilla - The First Chapter

Chapter One –Is This Thing On?

-= Journal Entry =-

My name is Jim Westfield – I think I might get killed here pretty quick so I want to put these notes down for anyone who might find them. My speech-to-text thing here is working pretty well, here, thank God; gives me something to talk to besides my sister. If you happen to find them, please contact Rick Westfield or Theresa Bowman and tell them what’s happened to us. I have no idea where they are – Theresa is my mom and she lives in West Covina so I’m hoping that if there’s any central evacuation place for Los Angeles that you can find her there. Rick Westfield is my Dad, he was taken ashore and we’re trying to find him right now.

Me and my sister, we’re on board this old beast of a yacht, the Horner C. It is my Dad’s boat and although I spent a lot of time keeping it clean, I’ve never driven (sailed?) it before. I have almost zero experience at how things work when the boat is under power even though I’ve been at sea for over six months in the past two years.

Right now, it’s about 2230 and the weather is pretty bad. I’m hoping that the boat can handle it but it’s gonna be a real close race. We’re shipping water up to the bridge door and the wind is blowing this boat like a kite all over the ocean. I can’t hold my course to more than 2 or 3 degrees and that might either be the wind or the fact that this old tub hasn’t really moved in over 10 years. I’m watching the GPS, the compass and Nancy all at once. She’s sitting next to me at the map table, her eyes are as big as saucers but her mouth is nothing more than a small scar in her head. I’m so scared that I’ve already pissed myself once.

The world has changed in a week, man; I don’t know how else to say it. At first we were watching the news and they were saying that it was a virus of some kind and that was bad enough. But then more news started rolling in…there were coordinated and simultaneous attacks in several major cities. We couldn’t figure out if we were looking at some kind of terror attack but then it just kept getting worse and worse.

We listened to it all – the riots in the Bay Area, Phoenix and St. Louis. The bug that was killing people in Baltimore and here in LA. Dirty bombs in Reno, Plano and Vicksburg. Because everyone on the Colony had family in one of those places, we were all riveted to the feed hoping to find out that they were okay. Our hopes started to dwindle as we caught the reports of the shootings. They were killing people because other people thought they might have been sick. Nobody bothered to check first, they just started shooting.

Even though we were out of danger, as in not about to die of the plague or nuclear contamination we had other problems. The Colony itself is…well…strange. Because it’s strange, the problems you experience here are also strange. It takes a while to understand it but it’s become both my home and the most dangerous place on earth. Dad had gotten himself into the middle of something that I still don’t know the half of…now he’s gone and I think some drug pirates are trying to kill me.

They took Dad when they went ashore looking for survivors. I thought it was a bad idea but they didn’t give him a choice. Dad’s last words to us both, along with a quick hug, were: “If you don’t hear from me in three days, send a message to your mom. If you don’t hear from me in four, take the boat, the docks and anyone else you can and go north. There are a bunch of islands near the Puget Sound that are mostly uninhabited. You can dock there and stay for a while. If things go okay, I’ll find you there and we will be together again.” That was a week ago.

Three days later, we were leaving messages for Mom that we never heard a response to. Meanwhile, me and Nancy were dodging some really bad trouble from some scummy people my Dad screwed over. Six days later I was breaking down our little dock system for transport and trying to ignore the fact that it was my 15th birthday. We got out of there just by the skin of our teeth and that’s no lie.

I’m still dealing with all of this…five days ago our world was more or less normal. I’m doing this speech-to-text thing and posting it thing directly to a blog page. Hopefully someone will find it. I’ll post our coordinates as we go and if you haven’t seen a post from us in more than 24 hours, will you call the Coast Guard (assuming we still have one) or something? Our coordinates on the Colony were 33 10'01 N / 120 07'32 W – so I’ll use that as a starting point.

-= Journal Ends =-

Three weeks before the first attacks came, the day started with light that was streaming through the porthole and creating wavy designs on the bulkhead. Jim lay there in his bunk, listening to the thumps through the stateroom walls as either his father or his sister Dad or Nancy moved about in the salon overhead. In a few minutes, Jim could hear cartoons. Was Dad still asleep? His father, Rick, wasn’t so rigid about get-up times but it was understood that when the day was started it did not end until the job was finished. Depending on the work their chores could last only a couple of hours but other times they could go all day.
Jim’s bed was cozy and warm and he lay there for a few more minutes, just soaking up the peace and quiet. Jim dozed off again but was brought abruptly awake by the squawk of the intercom right next to his head. His father’s voice rasped through the speaker.

“Jim, get up.”

Jim pretended to be asleep, “Huh? Wha, dad?”

“Knock it off…Get up.” The intercom clicked off. How does he know? Jim wondered to himself. Kicking off the covers, he got up and stripped off his sleep attire – boxers and a tank top – and then changed into his wetsuit. The cold, damp neoprene made him shudder as though he were being electrocuted. Catching a look at himself in the mirror, he saw a gawky kid who hasn’t quite grown into his body. Jim was of average height and had arms and legs that were starting to see the benefit of hours of swimming – not exactly ‘hot’ but not ‘hopeless’ either.

Breakfast was starting to go cold in the galley. Jim used a spatula to cut off a section of the scrambled eggs still in the pan and poured off the last cup of coffee in the 12-cup pot. The empty pot told him that his father had been up for hours, now. Jim made a fresh pot of coffee while watching people on the neighboring boats through the galley windows.

Two older gay guys lived on the Key West Forever – they grew calamari and tuna. The younger one was over 50 and a built like a small grizzly bear. He reminded Jim of Mickey Rooney for some reason. The other guy was tall and thin with no qualms about doing naked yoga positions on their back deck. It was something that Rick never got used to. Jim knew that Naked Yoga Guy was into the whole neo-hippy thing…tan as an Indian with a salt-and-pepper mullet and never without the silver and turquoise pendant around his neck even if he was wearing nothing else.

An aluminum fishing boat buzzed by, but Jim didn’t recognize the passengers. There were almost a thousand people who lived in the colony and it was hard to keep track of everyone. Some people tried the fishing business for a few months and then packed up and went home. Others stayed for long periods of time and they became the nucleus of what was otherwise a pretty strange community. Dad called the gay guys The Furleys, for some reason. They were long-timers, which in this case meant that they had lived on the colony for over three years. The life ain’t easy, Dad was fond of saying. He himself had been with this colony for over seven years, which made him almost a founding partner.

Jim ate his breakfast sitting at the small table in the galley. The eggs and sausage he was eating didn’t come from a chicken or a hog but were culture-produced and then shipped here. After breakfast, Jim sat at the captain’s chair and put his feet up on the console to enjoy the quiet as long as it lasted. He sipped from a cup of the fresh stuff he had just made; it was strong enough to pass as espresso. Over his shoulder, Rick entered the boat from the rear deck without a word and made his way forward into the galley. Rick insisted that the small table next to the galley was called the “mess area” and it took weeks for Jim to learn that it was a term that had nothing to do with its current state of cleanliness. Jim thought it was odd that Rick was so gung-ho about learning nautical terms when nobody else around them seemed to care. Getting hung up enough to debate technical terms while the rest of your life is hanging in ruins was just another one of those idiosyncrasies that Jim knew better than to discuss. It wasn’t the only thing that drove him crazy about the old man. Coffee in hand, Rick took a long orbit around the table to swat Jim’s feet off of the console before sitting down.

“We’re losing some fish,” he said as a greeting. Rick flipped through the pages of a three-week-old LA Times that someone had left on the table while eating another plate of breakfast. Getting no response, he looked up over his glasses at Jim. “Are those rips in Pen 3 fixed yet?”

Jim didn’t answer immediately: to respond too quickly indicates guilt. After a moment he flipped the captain’s chair around to face his dad. “I did – I fixed ‘em and checked the whole net from end to end.”

“Then why are we losing fish?”

“Who says we are?”

“My fish-finder has the whole group counted – between last night and this morning we lost like 50 of them. I think the net’s ripped – get down there and check it again.”

Jim shrugged but didn’t say anything back. What would be the point? An argument with Dad was a risky bet just on the face of it; Rick could keep it going for hours or days if he wanted to. Arguing with him when you weren’t sure of your ground was like sticking your arm into a wood chipper and hoping to get it back in one piece. Jim knew that his dad rarely went underwater himself when Jim was aboard and that his fish finder wasn’t the most reliable piece of technology in the world. As Jim was going to work on first two pens anyway, checking out the third wouldn’t be too much of a hassle. Being with Rick had taught Jim to pick his battles. Jim took his coffee into the salon where Nancy ate delicately from one sausage as she watched her morning cartoons. Soon Rick appeared and shooed his children out to take care of the chores he had assigned to them.

Outside on the docks, Jim and Nancy started getting set up for some underwater work. The family had four pens that held fish – Dad was working on deploying a fifth but it would be a while before he gets the nets installed (Please see Appendix B – Dad’s Home Improvement Never Gets Done). The nets got ripped occasionally – predators trying to get in or a boat might run too close. All you needed was a basic hookah rig along with a wetsuit and you’re ready to go under the water. You will stay there, sometimes for hours at a time to fix any rips or tears. The process time is consuming but it wasn’t difficult and their father was pretty cheap; most tears were closed with zip-ties or industrial staples.

Most of the pen patrol tasks fell to Jim but he didn’t mind. It isn’t every kid that gets to spend his summer getting scuba-certified. They made you pass a basic scuba safety course in the first month onboard and the company had a program to get certified as a commercial diver if you were interested. Jim was in the water or under it about three or four hours a day…his fingers were permanently raisined from the water and his allergies had completely cleared up from having his sinuses constantly in salt water.

Jim finished strapping on his fins and his face mask by the time the hookah rig was pumping enough air. A small music deck pumps music through underwater speakers so Jim would have something to listen to while working. Jim jumped into the water, feeling the momentary shock that comes from jumping into the Pacific that early in the morning. The rule is, just let it go numb and then you’re okay – just be sure to get out if your hands start looking like a cadaver’s. Peeing in your suit helps, too.

This was the second summer that Jim had spent on board. The previous summer he spent by himself with his father and this summer his sister had come out to join them. To her credit, Nancy had quickly learned the esoteric aspects of fish farming. On ‘Pen Patrol’, their name for the underwater maintenance, the rule was that you couldn’t go under alone in case there was a problem and you needed help. Nancy had taken over as his line tender since she had first come aboard and Jim swam pens that would hold the Seaworld whale show with room left over. He attached a small line to his belt that they would tug on to tell each other what was happening. Jim and Nancy followed the Colony-approved system of tugs worked out: 1 tug was are you okay? One tug back meant, yeah – everything’s cool. Two tugs meant come up – you’re needed up here, three meant get your butt up here, pronto. If Jim tugged two tugs, it meant coming up soon and if Jim tugged three times, Nance yelled for dad.

Reggae thumped through Jim’s chest as he completed his search. It took about fifteen minutes to work his way down the entire net of Pen 3 with no rips found. The clouds of tilapia that were inside the nets swarmed around him but didn’t look any different from two days ago when Jim saw them last. Sometimes a single fish will die, float for a while and then sink to the net below. Predators, sharks among other things, will be swimming below and bite at it taking a chunk of net along with them…hence the rips. Jim saw a single dead tilapia lying on the bottom of the net and swam it back up to the edge of the net where he reached up and out of the water to flick it over to the sea side.

“Find any rips?” Nancy asked as Jim climbed out of the water.

Jim sat down next to her on the deck, pulling off his face mask and sweeping the water from his face. “Nope, no rips,” Jim replied, gasping as he said it. “Stupid fish-finder. Why can’t he get new sensing equipment?”

“He doesn’t know it’s broke,” Nancy said.

“I don’t think it’s broke. It just doesn’t work.”

“No, it’s broke,” Nancy said. She looked over at Jim slyly and Jim eyed her suspiciously.

“What do you mean?”

“I was playing around with it and it dropped onto the deck. You can’t tell that I did but I think it’s broken.”

Jim’s eyes narrowed and Nancy could tell instantly what he was thinking of doing. “Just don’t tell him, okay?”

“I just swam all of Pen Three for-“

“You don’t want Dad to know about you and Stacy do you?” Bang…now the game had changed. Nancy had walked in during a delicate moment with his girlfriend a few days ago and now Jim was aware what the price for keeping her mouth shut would be. Not that it mattered much to his dad what Jim and Stacy did but her father was violently protective of his daughter and Jim knew it. He shook his head in defeat and gave her a gentle thump on the head that turned into a neck squeeze. She was twelve but she could blackmail you better than mom. The squeeze was his common gesture of affection for his sister, one that said “I won’t like it but I’ll do it…be glad I love you.”

Jim’s relationship with Stacy was semi-serious. Stacy lived on the Seas of Cheese in a berth on the other side of the Colony, away from the Horner and grew tilapia like the Horner did. The Seas of Cheese served as a Colony ‘shake down’ boat and occasionally swapped tenants as people either moved back home or found more permanent lodgings and her parents had decided to try life as fish farmers. Her parents did not, however, have the benefit of Rick’s fish-tending experience. Previous tenants had at one point dumped sewage near the Horner pens – practically a capital crime on the Colony. The incident happened over two years ago and was forgotten by almost everyone. Rick however, could hold a grudge and it’s made the SoC a target for his ire ever since.

After Jim caught his breath, they moved over the first and second pens and started the whole process over again. Today’s pen chores took about three hours – right until lunch. After lunch they scrubbed and swabbed up as best they could – the Horner cleans up well but it is work. They finished with the chores with about two hours of daylight left and Dad took them in the launch, an old wakeboard rig dubbed Horner C Minor to the company admin ship, the Phoenix. Some Colony folk pointed out to Rick that there was no ‘C Minor’ only to get a World-Class stink-eye and growls about minding their own business.

Rick surprised Jim greatly by treating the two of them to dinner and a movie on board the Phoenix. A couple of hours of recreation on a ship that features a restaurant and a movie theatre can do wonders for the morale of two tired, hungry kids. While they joked and laughed over dinner they looked almost like the Pac Fish brochure pictures of a ‘happy Colony family’. As they motored back home in the C Minor, the sun flared and then dipped into the Pacific. The clouds on the horizon were gradually painted gold and then red before finally fading into the darkness.