Page 8 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons
P. 8
The Space Hulk
“If I may interject, said Fred Feghootsky, “I think we are taking
Leith away from his unresolved issue.”
“Thank you.” Mauker looked out at the predominantly
sympathetic table of Daemons. “I have developed a number of
ways to end this story, but none as yet has satisfied me fully. I will
tell you what they are; maybe you can spot their virtues and flaws—
or even come up with a better line of development.”
“First: ignore the prisoners; treat them as an undifferentiated
mass of undesirables as our leaders did the people rendered to
Guantanamo, and focus on competing forces down here. This
would look like indifference to incarceration’s horrors,
unfortunately introducing a political element I would rather exclude.
So this plot would revolve around exposure of the medical
experimentation, potentially by a whistle-blower protagonist, and
his or her struggles against authority. I could also take it in the other
direction: that our adversaries are running this aerial house of pain,
and the hero is our secret agent discovering the truth and using it to
bring down the villains.”
“Second: launch an attempt to break through the defenses and
liberate the prisoners, carried out by commandos. That assault force
could be mercenaries, launched by miscreants with an evil agenda.
Or, conversely, a potential savior could be trapped up there,
someone with great moral authority whose release would evidently
have a greatly beneficial effect on the future of mankind and the
planet. In either case, the climax is that attack on what was
supposed to be impregnable. So, an opportunity to deploy a lot of
gadgets, real and imaginary, to do the job—or fail. Spectacularly, of
course.”
“Third: set the whole thing on the hulk, borrowing the cinematic
conventions and clichés to which Rutger alluded. Here we have
prisoners with vastly different personalities, agendas and skills. They
may have all or part of the truth about the experiments—maybe
something to do with a broken sensor and its replacement—but all
are on the verge of madness, anyway: stir-crazy and claustrophobic
to an extreme. What can they do? Hijack a supply ship, or at least
somehow send a coded message understood by only one person on
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