A Peek Beneath the Duct Tape: My Very Own Serial Number

Trying to explain how how I came up with My Very Own Serial Number is a bit like trying to answer that famous old "chicken or egg" question.

On the one hand, there was the recent Saturday morning when I lay half-asleep in bed, toying with ideas for MC stories and eventually coming up with the two images I first posted here.

As you can see from reading MVOSN, I did end up using both those images in my story. I didn't, however, find any place to plug in the extra scene I hinted about. That Saturday morning, I envisioned my protagonist coming upon an encampment of resistance fighters in the woods, during the final days of conflict, and seducing some hapless young guy with a display of flickering eyes and skin patterns. Oh, well. I think focusing on Duncan in the final two chapters made for a much hotter, scarier story, and I hope you feel the same.

By the way, Duncan is one of the two characters I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, who were meant to be throwaways but ended up becoming central to the story. The other, in case you haven't guessed, was 2520. All in all, the writing process for MVOSN was much more loosey-goosey than usual for me. I started with only a rough idea of where I wanted to go, and I did go exactly where I wanted. But I made up a lot of what happened in between the first and last scenes as I went along.

And thus we come to the "egg" half of this Peek Beneath the Duct Tape. Once I realized MVOSN was going to be a long, detailed story instead of the quick one-off I'd originally planned, I turned to an old MC fantasy from my teen years to help flesh out the details.

Now, I went to a small, conservative private high school in the Bible Belt. It had all the usual cliques of popular kids, all the usual propaganda fests disguised as pep rallies, and (thanks to a double assload of written and unwritten rules) a far larger than usual supply of conformity.

But as you can imagine, I never quite managed to conform. Oh, I tried; after all, I was the the good little girl, back then. But I had the wrong clothes, the wrong background, the wrong tastes (Heh, little did I know just how wrong!), the wrong everything to ever fit in at that school. Still, watching those popular kids and sitting in on those Naz- whoops! - pep rallies did give me plenty of fantasy fodder.

It occurred to me, even as a teen, that you could use the whole peer pressure/conformity thing to brainwash an entire generation. You'd start by suborning the world's best researchers, to get them preaching that conformity is actually a good thing. Then you take over the military, both for the muscle power and to keep them from spoiling your plans. Fortunately, with the fighting forces so gung-ho about conformity and obedience already, it's simple enough to get them started on your "performance enhancing" drugs. They'll do whatever their commanding officers tell them to do, and you'll have gotten to their commanding officers first.

And then, ohhh then, you can go after the teens. Most of them are just dying to be popular and/or kewl already - or failing that, at least to be accepted. So you start by secretly brainwashing the popular kids, getting them to talk in monotone and adopt the latest in robo-fashion (Yes, the bodysuits and contact lenses were a part of this fantasy even then, though you won't be surprised to hear that the lenses I originally had in mind were mirrored). Then you get the teachers and administrative staff on your zombified team. Finally, you hold a pep rally where aaaaall the kids are invited to join the popular crowd. They just have to file down front and drink the magic Kool-aid. Oh, and if a few nonconformists sneak out the back door, no problem: there's a platoon of polite-but-firm soldiers out there waiting for them.

Of course, it goes without saying that the kids would then march home and doctor their parents' drinks. After all, my fantasies were never limited to just my own high school or even my whole town or state. It always about taking over the world, baby! Muaaahahahaha!

And here you thought I was just a submissive little thrall. ;-P


P.S.: If you think MVOSN pokes fun at certain churches, pseudo-churches, and extremist ideologies on both sides of the political spectrum, you're absolutely right.