Postaday for January 1st: New Skin
If you could spend the next year as someone radically different from the current “you” — a member of a different species, someone from a different gender or generation, etc. — who would you choose to be?
If I could spend time as anyone else, it would be as Lancaster, the evil robot assassin hell-bent on killing every secret agent in the world.
Why is killing all these agents? What’s his end-game? What happens if he succeeds? And why does he choose to kill them in such elaborate and increasingly ridiculous ways? Is killing agents really his main goal, or is there some greater purpose to his scheme?
I need to know, because I invented him, and I have no idea what he’s doing. He’s the main antagonist in my terrible spy novel, A Football Makes a Lousy Briefcase. Note: terrible is a subgenre of the spy novel genre. This is supposed to be terrible. I have whole sections called Deus Ex Machina. It’s a play on words, see, since Lancaster is a machine and all.
Lancaster is an AI based on a program that was built to test agents in the field. But things got out of control. I don’t want to reveal too much, even though I’ll probably never actually finish the novel… and even if I did I wouldn’t bother editing it… and if I somehow edited it I certainly wouldn’t get it published… and if I accidentally published it I just don’t see anyone buying it, much less reading it (not unlike the novel I published A Night Without Sunshine and my collection of short stories Still Life With Zombie).
But nevermind all that. The point is, I need to get inside Lancaster’s metal head and figure out what’s going on. It’s the principal of the thing. I’m struggling with the main plot line of the novel as it is, and if I can just figure out where this is going, maybe I can figure out a way to stop him.
What’s great about Lancaster is I could spend a whole year being him, and not really mess anything up, since he clones himself regularly so that he can personally conduct “exams” on agents in order to kill them. I don’t have to “be Lancaster” to be Lancaster.
And a year should be just the right amount of time. Lancaster once posed as coffee machine at a cheap motel in Reno just to get access to an ATF agent who had stolen a thumb drive from a CISEN operative. (I actually haven’t written that chapter yet, but, gosh, it’s a good idea and I’m totally going to use it.)
CISEN, by the way, is the acronym for Mexico’s intelligence agency. I just found that on Wikipedia, since I’m pretty much making this up as I go along.