Are You Sad Yet (RB Vs. Empress Theresa, Chapter 6) · 6:23pm Apr 22nd, 2021

Previously, on Empress Theresa:
The fatal flaw of wind turbines: the eradication of any and all wind, anywhere on the planet, by an alien. Take that, green energy!
And now:

I was getting depressed. This BBC program had been giving me nothing but bad news. Did anything go right in this world?

That's typically how news works, yes.

The United States was also in a terrible mood.

The entire landmass is in a bad mood? I assume we can blame HAL for this, as well.

It had always been assumed a man with the will power to become President would never suddenly resign without a fight. President Nixon had resigned after being under tremendous pressure for two years. President Martin simply walked away.

Will power? Yeah, something like that.

The poor guy had condemned the world to a slow, miserable death. There was no chance he would be allowed to stay in office.

You underestimate the U.S. Government's ability to disagree on anything. It's quite formidable, I can assure you.

I must have made some of my trademarked funny faces because Nancy laughed.

Your what? I can assure you, this has never been mentioned once in the last five chapters.

If I had told people about HAL years ago, would any of this have happened? That was my burden.

Oh no.
Anyway...

As the BBC announcer explained, the program was quickly put together for me. I needed to know everything so that I could guess what HAL might be thinking all this time and why he did what he did.

Given that this is an alien whose motives have been unknown and who has never once attempted to communicate with you for the eight years it's been in your stomach... good luck with that.
On the other hand, the answer this particular novel will go with is so glaringly obvious, I don't know why we're even bothering to pretend it isn't.
The captain of the ship that found Theresa had this to say, in interview:

“It was a fool’s mission. It had taken seventy years to find the Titanic, although it was known where it sank. Now, we were being asked to find a tiny body, which almost certainly sank, that may have been moved a hundred miles or more by ocean currents in any direction.

To be fair, the hard part about getting to the Titanic was moreso getting down to it than finding it. The thing's 3,700 meters below the surface of the water. That's 6,500 pounds of pressure per square inch, folks.
And also, a fun fact: dead bodies float after they start to decompose. Now, that process would probably have been slowed down significantly by the temperature of the water, but the fact that it's salt water means that the body wouldn't have to accumulate as much gas to be buoyant. Food for thought.
Oh, and don't look up what else happens to a corpse in water. Especially degloving. Especially don't look that up.

“In the beginning of the voyage we had to plow through ten to fifteen foot swells typical of the North Atlantic in June. The ship’s rolling motion was comforting to sailors who loved the rock-a-bye baby sensation,

The. What?
Anyway, the ship manages to find Theresa because her irradiated body killed a fuckton of fish, which then attracted a fuckton of sharks.
And I do mean a fuckton.

“’Captain. It’s a school of sharks. There are tens of thousands of them. The water is red.’

I recognized the cursed white tips on the rounded dorsal fins. Bloody ocean whitetips. The scourge of seamen.

Ah yes, the oceanic whitetip shark. Famous for inhabiting warm, tropical waters.
Shark fact, most North Atlantic sharks live close to the coastlines. The only species of shark that can withstand the temperatures of the middle of the North Atlantic is the Greenland shark. They also tend to live for (an estimated) three to five centuries, giving them the longest lifespan of any vertebrate.

The sea was red with blood everywhere and around the ship. Through binoculars I could see sharks fighting over pieces of dead sharks. They were eating each other.

Shark cannibalism is pretty common, actually.
Anyway, enough shark facts. Theresa is found, predictably, in the middle of the feeding frenzy.

“Sharks were lunging at the unconscious Theresa but were being killed before they could get a bite of her. Other sharks fed on the bleeding dead. This nightmare had been going on for days.

So how do you think they're going to get Theresa's body out of this mess? I didn't show you, but a helicopter was mentioned earlier in the chapter (this is an aircraft carrier, by the by. Didn't mention that either). A rational person might think that they could use the helicopter to retrieve the body, lowering someone down on a ladder or some similar thing. Perhaps equipped with some kind of shark-repellant bat-spray.
But that's just not this captain's style.

“I ordered a launch be lowered and twenty machine gunners to the deck.
“The launch was lowered with six sailors. It set off towards Theresa, but it would not be safe to pull her out of the water with a crowd of sharks lunging at them. I ordered the machine gunners to fire at the sharks. Officers kept them firing to the left and right of Theresa, but no closer than fifty yards from her lest they hit her or the launch. It was only necessary to wound one of the monsters and its blood drew attack from others. Thousands of rounds were fired per minute but only a small fraction of the sharks were being killed. Many times as many sharks swimming deeper down were coming up to the surface to join the frenzy. The slaughter was working. There were two areas of mayhem safe distances from Theresa. By the time the launch got to her there were only a few confused sharks nearby and they weren’t attacking.

What, you expect me to have something funny to say about this? They just machine-gunned down ten thousand sharks, probably causing untold ecological damage. I'm mourning, here.
Anyway, Theresa is fished up and checked by a doctor. She's dead as a doornail. Then Prime Minister Blair comes on-screen.

“When I heard you were dead the tears leaked from my eyes. So much hope crushed.

This is most certainly and absolutely how normal humans talk normally.

Of course, when you were on the Ronald Reagan nobody would have believed you could escape the plane, so nobody was suspicious of anything you carried on board. You were allowed to carry the garbage bag of bottles without anybody giving it a thought. The reason for wanting to remain afloat was easy to guess. A woman doesn’t mind dying so much if she knows her body will be preserved.

Men, of course, don't care. Anyway, her body would probably be better preserved if it were fully submerged, waves can do things to a corpse (no seriously though don't look up degloving, it's nasty).
Next, testimony from the captain of the carrier that Theresa was flown out from:

He looked up at the Chairman to give a heartbreaking remark. “When I saw it was a girl, it was too late to change my mind. What could I do with her with six thousand people on the ship?” I hate using clichés, but in this case there really wasn’t a dry eye in the room. It was a pitiful scene.

Thanks for telling me, I wouldn't have known otherwise. Remember everyone, BE SAD.
Back to Blair:

“The world settled in for the long wait for the HMS Queen Elizabeth to return to England. Somber music was played on radio day and night. A favorite selection was Saint-Saens’s The Swan for cello and piano made famous by Russian ballet as The Dying Swan. But the most appropriate piece for the girl descended from the Irish was a soulful instrumental version of Danny Boy. It was perfect. Great Britain was proud to bring one of its own back home for a final visit.

Yeah, except her family would be from Ireland proper, not Northern Ireland. I don't know if Mr. Boutin knows the difference. And either way, that's not how Britain works.
By the way, this is Danny Boy:

It's no Horslips, I'll tell you what.
I love how all the radio stations—every radio station in the ENTIRE WORLD—decides that this is BE MISERABLE time. The world's about to die a slow death, people, let there be some levity before the end.

“But for most of the world there was no consolation. Dreams of a good future were gone. There was nothing to look forward to but misery or death. Parents spent all the time they could with their children. Mothers held their children and cried, wondering why this horror was happening.

Are you SAD yet? You're supposed to be SAD. See, it says it right in the book!
Here's the deal, folks: this doesn't work. You can't make a reader feel emotions by telling them to feel emotions. You have to show things that evoke those emotions. If the book had instead brought the camera away from Theresa, shown what had happened while she was dead, shown the retrieval of her body, shown us any of this... it might have worked. And then we would feel relieved when Theresa revived.
Instead, we get told all of this in a dry, emotionless manner. And so it doesn't work.
This is what BE SAD is: it's a bad, unevocative way of writing that sucks out any emotional connection that could have been made.
Anyway.
It turns out Theresa is not actually dead; her body has been preserved. She's in suspended animation, essentially.

“Everybody looked at the doctor in expectant silence. What were we to do with you? “The ranking doctor protested. ‘I don’t care how advanced these beings are. No technology can keep her alive this way.’
“I waited a moment to give the doctor’s comment due respect. Then I said, ‘Why not?’
“‘Every atom needs to be kept in its proper place. Her body uses all the space available. There’s no way to get to the atoms.’
“’Quite right, doctor, but if she dies we are all lost.’
“Everybody stared at the doctor. He knew he’d lost.
“’Put her in a patient room.’

That's... not how atoms work. Or (theoretically) suspended animation, for that matter. And even if it was... what the fuck is the doctor going to do?
We'll skip ahead, here—there's very little of note. Their plan is essentially to put her in a room at 105 degrees (Fahrenheit, even though we're in England) and see what happens. She revives once her body reaches normal human temperatures, and regains consciousness shortly after that, which brings us back to the start of the last chapter, at long last.

Then I remembered something. When I woke up in the hospital Blair said I was the right kind of person to do what was needed. This made no sense if he meant restoring the wind. Anybody could do that if it could be done.

Uh...
You do realize that that's... not how this works? Right? Because this isn't a natural phenomenon?
Right?

What he meant was I would be the right kind of person after the wind situation was fixed. If I could influence HAL to restore the wind, I could influence him to do other things later. What kind of person I was would be very important.
I told Nancy, “He’s not talking about the wind. He’s talking about what I’ll do later. He knows I won’t mess up the world like a world dictator.”
“I see” said the suddenly aware Nancy. “It’s an amazing concept.” “Your Prime Minister knew it one minute after I woke up. He’s a smart man.”

A smart man? That would be a nice change.
Now, since we saw it in the quotes on the copyright page (still not gotten over that), we know that Theresa does eventually become empress of the world.
Which I still find kind of odd, given how much play the U.S. and its founders have had in this novel. One would think the establishment of a sole worldwide monarchy would be something they would be against. Oh well. Maybe this way we'll actually be able to get something done.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

All of humanity had been sweating blood all day waiting to hear what I had to say. The Earth stood still. Baseball games in America had been postponed.

Heaven forbid the Yankees miss a game or two. Freddy must be beside himself.

Plane flights were canceled for lack of passengers. Every person, who could by any means stay home watching television, did. This was the critical meeting. If nothing came out of it, “we are all lost”.

And that's the end of the chapter, and with that, I'm happy to announce that we are now one-quarter into the book.
Yaaaaaaaaaaaay.
See you next time, folks.

Next Chapter >>

Report RB_ · 155 views · #RB Vs. #Empress Theresa

Comments ( 3 )