Last night, I watched Chronicle, which I generally enjoyed, even if one of its defining features — the “found footage” format — is also one of its weakest. Aesthetically, I think it works; as Scott Tobias notes, it often “seem[s] less like a movie than like the fantastical abruptly, artlessly colliding with the real world.” But on a practical level — who’s filming? why are they filming? still? — it’s a weak link in an otherwise quite entertaining, realistic take on superpowers. I’m a little tired of the shaky-cam, found-footage thing in general, which I think works better in horror anyway, but the other stuff makes Chronicle worthwhile.
Meanwhile, more fun household repair projects found me today: helping with the kitchen sink before I’d even had breakfast, then spending a couple of hours trying (and failing) to fix the garage door after dinner.
In between, I watched The Sting off and on — it’s long been a favorite, and I got the Blu-Ray for Christmas — and wrote this with my weekly group:
The Wizard was an engineering marvel. It was designed for interstellar travel before interstellar travel was cool. Even today, nobody’s quite sure how the Millenium Corporation did it, how they raised all the capital needed to build the damn thing, which even today, a decade later, would be the envy of almost any fleet out among the stars. If it hadn’t been destroyed along with the Earth, just a year after launch, I don’t doubt it would be flying still.
But you didn’t come here for a history lesson. You came here to hire our services, put us on your payroll. I have to promise you, though, what we do here, it doesn’t come cheap. And if we do it right, even you won’t remember hiring us to do it.
It’s called “temporal erasure,†or “history smudging.†You might also have heard it called “time squelching,†if you really have been doing your homework, like you say. But frankly, those folks are amateurs. It’s like using a hacksaw instead of a scalpel to cut out a cancer; the end result is the same, more or less, but there’s a whole lot more collateral damage with the hacksaw.
Chopping up the past too messily is the surest way to bring the time cops down on your ass. If you’ll pardon my French.
We use a scalpel here, with laser precision, and we get results. Results so good, nobody’s the wiser, not even the client.
For instance, you started off by asking me what I knew about the Wizard, one of the first ships launched from Old Earth. A great hulking beast of a ship — ugly too — but you don’t need to be sleek to be fast out in space, I guess; you don’t have to be aero to be dynamic. Massive, and massively expensive. And still under investigation. The circumstances of its destruction, the explosion in the core that took out the ship and the planet below it were suspicious enough that the System’s never quite closed the book.
In fact, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think they were just about to report on some kind of new evidence? An ten-year investigation, arrests possible, iminent…
Of course, they aren’t going to find any. Aren’t going to have found any…? Tenses can get complicated around here, as you might imagine. But not to worry, your Corporation is safe. I could ask you WHY you wanted to destroy your own ship — it really was an engineering marvel, nothing quite like it since — but that isn’t what you paid us for.
Tomorrow, I return my attention to this other short story.