Re: Chapter Three - The Road Ahead
Notes From Iterant Point
Notes from Iterant Point Re: Chapter Three – The Road Ahead
This is Week 3 of our chapter-by-chapter look through Ascension at Aechyr. One of these days I’ll get a regular schedule for this!
Originally this chapter was called “Crossroads,” as that was the term I first used instead of “flashpoint.” I wasn’t very satisfied with crossroads as the label for those critical moments in a timeline where everything changed. It fit just fine as a descriptor, of course, but I didn’t feel it had enough punch or weight. Eventually I stumbled upon the term flashpoint and immediately liked that much better. But I wanted to keep the automotive theme of the chapter title, so it became “The Road Ahead.”
Although the chapter actually starts with a look back. With one of Kennedy’s personal flashpoints, where he makes the first step in transitioning from an ordinary kid to a Time Peace agent. Getting the mood right and giving him a compelling reason to trust a stranger with an odd offer was a tricky problem. As is often the case, the best way I found to handle the problem was by approaching it from multiple directions and just incorporating it. It would be weird for Kennedy to just accept an invitation to some implausible secret society. So, let’s make him actually be skeptical. And while we’re at it, lean on the idea that he wants to go anywhere but here. Additionally, the figure who makes the offer seems to know them and can offer some assurances, however vague. Lastly, though it may be a major decision, we’ll make it possible for Kennedy and Blake to back out.
We also only get the slightest glance at Kennedy’s life before he became a timeless. Of course, we have to do a lot of inferring if we want any answers at all at this point. We’re really following the story of Kennedy’s missions with Time Peace, not his whole life. And this is very apparent with how little we see at first.
And we get a briefing about that mission which involves most of the chapter. The mechanics of inter-timeline travel and the functions of time gates are of course very important to this series, so here we take a few pages to get a handle on the basics. Way, way back in long-forgotten old drafts, flashpoints would dictate whether or not timelines went down a “good” or “bad” path. Of the many reasons that I didn’t end up settling with that idea, one was that it didn’t explain how timelines split from the main branch. One of the core ideas of the Time Gate series is that each book would involve visiting a new timeline, so I needed to explain that.
One inspiration that helped lead to the answer was, of all things, Star Trek. A frequent source of conflict in TNG-era Star Trek is of course, the Prime Directive. I liked the idea of a good guy faction essentially having non-interference as one of their core principles, and that influenced Time Peace and how the timeline mechanics would work. Instead of fighting over a “good” or “bad” future for each timeline, Time Peace and Anarakia would be fighting over whether or not to interfere with the timeline. Obviously, Time Peace’s mission plays out very differently to Starfleet’s. For one, Time Peace is forced to intervene to fend off Anarakia. But the principle of letting worlds develop naturally is still present.
One other influence on landscape of the war was, believe it or not, that other big sci-fi franchise with Star in its name. I very much like the dynamic of a few plucky heroes facing an overwhelming force. So as with the original Star Wars films, the good guys are outnumbered by the bad guys. And therefore, letting the bad guys make more timelines means that they will have an advantage. Since Anarakia has more agents, they can more easily manage multiple battlefields, while Time Peace can’t respond. So why haven’t they yet? Well, unlike the Empire in Star Wars, Anarakia is a fractious organization. Its leaders spend as much time scheming against each other as they do against Time Peace. After all, their biggest concern is who gets to rule these new timelines. And as the song goes, everybody wants to rule the world.
Finally, like many authors, I like to give my chapters a sense of completeness. I try to make it so they aren’t merely just a collection of pages, but are centered around a single event. I want readers to be able to say, “you know, the chapter about [X]” and be able to just look at the table of contents and find it. So to help make it feel complete, I ended the chapter by circling back to Ken and Blake’s conversation while waiting for David. I think it gives it a sense of completion, and gives David a bit of character. And it also sets up why Kennedy and Blake are so unprepared for the next chapter.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if there is anything that stood out to you in Chapter 3, or if any of this made you see events differently. And keep following along as we discuss the rest of the book!
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