Page 65 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Operation KNEECAP

capacity? Plan B for the Papps should be to take down the modern
world with its insane rush to knock the props out from under itself.
Yes, if the swine reject the pearls on offer, send them to the
knacker! It won’t take much to precipitate World War III, given the
weapons on hair-trigger we’ve produced for decades. One after
another opportunity to dismantle them, beat the swords into
plowshares, has been squandered—often intentionally. The trick in
this sort of tale is to make the reader sympathetic with scorched
earth as a well-deserved fate. Your protagonists could embody such
dashed hopes, understanding profoundly what must follow the last
chance for our civilization if it is not taken. You can make a case for
humanity limping along as always, and the world just declining
instead of ending with a bang; that may well be our future, but not
much of a story.”
“That kind of bleak and hopeless stuff may well appeal to
disaffected youth,” said Perversity Tinderstack, impatiently. “But
the story really hinges on this assassination program, KNEECAP. I
think Brad is right about that—but it creates an impossible, or at
least uncomfortable, problem for adult readers. Although we are
not creating serious fiction here, folks, we can’t allow our
protagonists to be so abject or sleazy not even to be credible anti-
heroes. So you are better off, Cyril, making murder the last resort,
and showing the Papps abandoning their moral compass, justifying
their means by the end—never mind that the end is just as
improbable as the means you’ll invent. The brothers will be undone
by their hubris, self-defeated without realizing neither they nor their
goal could succeed.”
“I would like to get back to the hard science involved here,” said
Izzy Azimuth. “You raise the fascinating possibility of three
pioneers, men who went against the orthodoxy of their times,
meeting and coming up with a discovery that is then lost for a
century—but nevertheless has not been found again independently
by thousands of scientists working in their respective fields. I know
the ‘lost formula’ has been a trope of our genre for a very long
time—I mean, how did Dr. Frankenstein electrocute a stitched-
together corpse into life without a secret no one knew?—but you

64