Chapter 1 - Trigger Unhappy

Thus begins proper, the story of the continuing saga as told in the StormKeepers Chronicles. This time, the story is seen from the viewpoint of a young mechanical genius who designs and builds flyers in his spare time. The chapter starts with him taking his craft out for a spin, and ends with... well, let's hope he makes it out more or less in one piece in the next.

The prospect of a ghastly orbital bombardment incident is brought to mind here. Now, the Imperial Forces may not have much of a defense strategy on faraway Mars, since Emperor Petresun has declared his Fortress Earth policy, but what must have been put in place must have been rather formidable weaponry in the first place.

After all, it was meant to repel the incoming Cybrids.

In this chapter, we're also looking at wild guesses into the amount of computing power that a mere college student can bring to bear, in a self-made box presumably containing spare modules cobbled together. If the Fire had wiped out much of Humankind's technology, by hundreds of years later, Gigahertz processors should have been the vogue all over again - throw in a little bit of parallelism and you've got a model which runs circles around today's hyper-spec'ed workstations, but would be a pale, cheap-skate imitation of the future day's state-of-the-art massively-parallel, multiple processing farms. Anyway, we're all entitled to wild guesses here - you can make your own here just as good as mine would be.

And then there is some subtle humor - like the phrase "where have you been - hiding under a rock??". Well, it's not exactly put this way here, but, I guess you might get the point. It's right there, near the end.

I'm really cramming stuff in here - so excuse me if the writing seems a little hurried, with bits and pieces here and there. Here's the deal - if and when this story is completed, stepwise refinement will prevail - and ver 1.03 or whichever-it-is of this chapter, and the ones that follow, will be gradually enhanced on as much as possible.

That's where I really need your help here - please, do feel free to comment on whatever you like, what you feel is missing, whatever is inconsistent in the story. Because that's the whole point - for the reader - you - to enjoy the story. Anything that you suggest that can bring about positive improvement in reading pleasure for yourself and all others that follow will be heartily welcomed.

And my e-mail address is louie@stormkeepers.org. Do send them in - it'd be really nice to hear from you.


Low Ee Mien
[SK] Louie G3L
Sun 11 Jul 1999