My main concern these days is anime. Whether its TV or movies doesn’t matter to me. Recently there were several live action films which, it seems to me would have worked quite well as anime with the right art mix. Unfortunately, I don’t paint or draw, and so the only path left to me creatively speaking is in the form of storytelling. Thus-in the immortal words of the quite mortal and alive Prince-‘tell me darlings can you picture this’….: FFFTKSST ELAINE

This is the story of Elaine Wilson, an 11 year old, bi-racial girl who lives on her family’s small farm in the area known as The Grapevine(about 35 miles north of L.A. County). Her father, Marcus Wilson is an engineer for JPL while her mother, Elizabeth Wilson is working as a molecular biologist on the campus of CAL POLY SLO. Their life is that of a typical middle class American family unless one finds the fact that her father is black and her mother is white strange in some way. At this particular point she has convinced her parents that she wishes to be an astronomer, so she can provide more comprehensive stellar charts. Her math skills are so so, but she is very intuitive, a good study and a fast learner. On this, the eve of her 12th birthday, she surprises her father with a rather complicated question with regard to solar fusion as they are running playfully through one of his fields. He stops for a moment to consider how he will answer the question in a way that should prove usefull to a 12 year old, and as he does, she takes this opportunity to hide from him in the tall summer grass. His look is at once pridefull, and then pensive as he considers his answer. He cannot screw this up if he’s going to be a usefull dad. Every day she seems to need him less and less and so this, he thinks, must be one of those defining moments in a father-daughter relationship. As it turns out, it is the last glimpse he will ever have of his daughter.
The story follows Elaine as she is abducted by an alien race called the FIT who have devised a technology that allows for the piloting of certain warships using the living CNS of vivisected children. This alien race does not serve as the most ideal antagonist in that they are still under the impression that human beings, by and large, are still in a rather primitive state of development and, though there have been tales of the building of small city/states, they basically still run about chasing down food and killing it with pointed sticks and/ or throwing rocks at it. They bear no animus of any kind, they are just operating on intelligence that is, by human standards, rather ancient. in fact they outsource the abductions to a small cartel of space pirates who happen to operate in the same sector of the galaxy as the solar system. Also, they come from a planet on the very edges of the galaxy and tend to prefer to keep a much greater distance between themselves and nearby stars than we do. Consequently, they do not take into account the advantages of quantum bombardment associated with stellar proximity. For them, random mutations are to be avoided at all costs, and are purely disadvantageous.
Basically, they have their head buried in the sand with regard to most species in the galaxy. Their economic wealth is such that they don’t have to rely on much in the way of trade agreements to get things and their technology is such that they can easily synthesize just about anything that they should happen upon that could be usefull to them. They are called the FIT but only because of the they way in which WE recognize speaking, per se. Actually they would call themselves FFFT in that they do not use vowels and their speech sounds more akin to a kind of amplified whisper.
In terms of disposition and culture, we would be the first to call them a most gentle and compassionate people, whose laws do not sanction such acts of abduction and human experimentation being carried out against another people under ANY circumstances including war. Unfortunately, their laws do not apply to the goings on aboard pirate ships operating in sectors outside of their jurisdiction.
The atrocity begins with the high minister of the FFFT receiving a report that suggested that, if it was the intention of the FFFT government to expand another 6 radians or so along the galaxy’s edge (and it definitely was), then certain improvements in shipping would have to be researched in order to insure homeworld security. This sounded reasonable so he immediately summoned the pre-eminent scientist of the FFFT homeworld and put him to work on the task. The scientist realized that if he continued on schedule he’d soon run afoul of the law, so he convinced the high administrator to give him almost complete autonomy by promising that in exchange the first prototype would be finished way ahead of schedule, meet all the military’s needs, and below budget. The scientist then contracts with the pirates for three ships. One is used as a poaching vessel and the other 2 are converted to lab stations.
His first five or six attempts fail miserably and he is desperately searching for a life form that will easily assimilate the new interface. It isn’t until one of the pirates suggests using human children that he even considers earth as a possible source of CNS drives, in that FFFT archives had described them as much too primitive. But he soon agreed to try when he was told that there was nothing in the way of defenses against their incursion, and that children were abundant and easily picked up anonymously.
The first capture was a nine year old boy named Alejandro Perez from Mexico who was captured in the desert of Arizona as he and his older brother were traveling to find work in the US. This was six years prior to the capture of Elaine. The boy turned out to be a godsend for the scientist, in that not only did he save the program, but he was so good at running a ship that he would be ultimately integrated into the flagship of the small flotilla of 10 ships that Elaine would be a part of later. His performance in battle was nothing short of miraculous, and when the administrator saw the replay of a skirmish involving several Centaurian battle cruisers and the three pirate ships under the scientists command, he gave the scientist practically unlimited resources and commissioned the production of military ships that would accommodate the new CNS drive. He also put together specially trained crews, its officers receiving instruction at times from the scientist himself.
The flagship captain DHKKTZZ takes notice one day of several drive partitions to he has no access but also contain dynamic, rather than static data structures. He also notes that the partitions of the flagship drive are accessed by all the ships in the flotilla constantly and without firewalls and/or system request protocols. He undertakes to hack his way in, and finds an interactive environment of alien children with whom he is not familiar. when one of the children approaches him he shy’s away, but the child quickly grasps his virtual hand and says to him that he should not fear-that he is merely being touched by the ship itself.
Over the next 5 months of earth time or so he and Alejandro develop quite a working rapport. During a battle with an alien race in which total tonnage outweighs that of the flotilla by a factor of four the ships perform so well that word soon spreads to his homeworld of his prowess as a group commander. He is soon brought before the High administrator for decoration, and it is at this point that he makes a fatal error. He submits a report to the Administrator to the effect that the performance of his group is the direct consequence of interstellar atrocities having been committed by the FFFT government and that these ships are sentient life forms. He goes on to detail the personalities and history of each one in a way which reads like some sort of fairy tale. As a result he finds himself replaced by a female rear admiral with orders to secure the drive partitions from any outside perusal. He is detained indefinitely on the basis of insanity, his career destroyed, and otherwise disgraced.
Alejandro then comes up with a brilliant plan to get him out. he secretly apprehends Elaine’s father who has been searching for his daughter for 3 years at this point on the streets of LA. but rather than keep him on board, he transports him to Elaine’s ship and devises a special tiara which allows her ship’s captain to communicate with him. His daughters voice drives him along to the engineering section with the thoroughly confused captain in tow, and when they enter they are both brought to there knees to find what amounts to a digitally hardwired carcass of what was once a human child. The child is in fact alive but only by medical standards. The father fights to contain his horror and shame, and instead attempts to reassure his daughter that everything will be ok. The captain, upon hearing the conversation is himself distraught at the notion that he has been party to such an atrocity and tries to reassure Marcus that he will get to the bottom of things.
He is thoroughly aghast at this point and knows not what to make of the captain’s behavior, so he inquires of Elaine regarding it. She informs him that he is in great anguish over what he has just witnessed, she then shuts the engineering section door and begins wrapping the captain in cables and wires. the captain struggles at first then calms down into a kind restfull state. Marcus asks Elaine not to hurt him. as she gives her response to him she wraps a huge conduit around Marcus. She says to Marcus that the captain is not authorized to be in this section of engineering, consequently he is seeing the CNS drive hardware for the first time. Marcus argues that this is no reason to hurt him. To this she responds that he is hurt badly by this realization and that she is holding him. She says he didn’t realize that he needed this but its what one does when someone is hurting. the conduit squeezes Marcus ever so slightly then slightly releases, slight tension and release, in the way that a daughter would commune with her father at such times. He falls away in tears at his daughters makeshift hand as she now seeks to console him with the only tools available to her.
-to be continued-