The Cast of Characters:

Mallory Carpenter:

Mallory Carpenter is a very good-looking man. Even though he is older, Carpenter is accustomed to having young women look back at him as he passes them on the sidewalks. He is well-schooled, well-traveled, and has held some powerful positions. One of his many gifts is his ability to look at seemingly unconnected, divergent things or people and see patterns. His brain sees order when the rest of the world sees chaos, an invaluable skill in his role as a macrosocial scientist. It is his ability to work with divergent peoples and complex issues that eventually landed him his job with the State Department as the Junior Ambassador to France, and the chair of the International Atomic Energy Conversion and Containment Commission. Along with a little help from a friend in Costa Rica.

Dr. Barbara Benson:

Dr. Barbara Benson, or Diane as she is known by in Buffalo, New York has spent the better part of her twenties studying hyperphysics at St. John’s College. She had taken a first in both her lab work and her trial field studies, and she has earned a rock-solid reputation as a serious scholar. Her doctoral dissertation expanded on the pioneering work done at Cambridge by 1920s physicist Paul Dirac, and was widely regarded as a must-read for physics students interested in contemporary quantum mechanics and in the possibility of chronometric meandering. While most students her age worshipped heavy liquidmetal rock bands, Benson pinned pictures of Max Planck, Stephen Hawking and Karen Uhlenbeck up in her dorm room. Dr. Benson is the creative genius behind the discovery of Hybrid Mechanics and time travel. While she didn’t enjoy many hobbies, Benson is a connoisseur of what she called pulp science fiction, which was her speculative fiction books, magazines, and films from the 1940s through the 1960s. Probably because of her professional training, she had a passion for the old science fiction stories that rang true to her about how people and technology learned to get along together. For her, it was always about the people, especially when they were faced with wild and unimaginable technologies or lifeforms. Her closets are filled with boxes of magazines with robots and aliens splashed across the covers, and video movie box covers with big red letters that spelled out doom for the frightened astronauts. As an aficionado during her college days back in the early 2040s, she once had an article published in a European science fiction tabloid featuring a list of her favorite classic SF clichés and blunders that were so clunky that they should really never appear in a vintage SF story, but did all the time. Click here to read Dr. Barbara Benson’s Pulp Science Fiction BooBoos.

Robert:

While he had finally made it to his nineteenth birthday, not much else was happening in his life. Robert, Carpenter’s nephew, was not born with a handsome face, nor was he gifted with a magnificent mind. He was not a stellar athlete, but he did have an acute case of acne, and appeared short for his age. All these factors combined to make the end of his teenage years somewhat less than joyous: a regrettable set of facts, not lost on his classmates who rarely missed an opportunity to harass any likely victim. Despite these issues, our protagonist, Robert, will save the Earth several times over. Or, it might just kill him.

Butch:

Butch is a horrible bully who sleeps in a FEMA trailer since his parents were taken off to jail. He has a perfect 0.0 GPA at school and wears a black bowler hat. He hates Robert and makes his life miserable.

Master Abhinc:

Little is known about the mysterious and evil being from Costa Rica. The CIA is investigating.