Dirk Halfspeed Reimagined - Part 4

Joe may be the only one of the trio that has the same name in the reimagined series. Joe King. What is he doing on Nexus station? What has drawn him here? At this stage of his life, Joe is a member of the team that is developing the Sirius prototype - an advanced personality program. He is on Nexus Station as part of his team for some kind of project celebration. He is also here to see a speaker, Professor Leo Rinaldo, who is on the station to give a speech about something that interests Joe. Joe will meet with Rinaldo privately after the presentation and will learn something about Rinaldo's theories about time

Joe has been on the station once before, about two years ago. He was dating a woman then, named Eleisha, and they had a terrific date on the station. Being on the station again reminds Joe of this past fling. Joe reminisces and has several flashbacks about the time he had spent with Eleisha.

Dirk Halfspeed Reimagined - Part 3

The reimagined version of Seran, her last name is similar to Dippity, but it's a name that would actually be found in a contemporary phone book.

Seran is young, she is married, and she has been frustrated and unhappy in her marriage. She has come to Nexus station because she has left her husband Noel and has come to start a new life for herself.

She checks into her room (Nexus Station has a hotel). She is distraught, she is upset. Now that she has left her husband she doesn't know what to do with herself. She flips through the channels on the TV in her room (which is actually called a "television", or "TV" in this universe). She finds nothing that interests her. She flips through a romantic drama, a comedy, a sports broadcast, and a porn movie. Disgusted and upset, she flips off the TV, and cries for a while.

After she has had a chance to get her tears out of her system, she decides to pull herself together and get out of her room. Go for a walk. Go explore the station. She passes a few clothing shops and browses.

At one of the shops she stops to admire a dress that has a black and white checker pattern. Perhaps she tries it on, perhaps she even buys it. The pattern on the dress is a visual symbol that will be repeated throughout the story - the theme of chess. Dirk "Knightly", Joe "King" - these are a few examples of the chess symbolism popping up.

She pops into a book store for a while. Then she decides she wants company, wants to be in a social setting. There are two bars that she knows of because she has already passed them by. One is a real meat market kind of place - men and women provocatively clad, and strange looking aliens too. The other bar is conservative, it is populated by businessmen, and a few women; they are conservatively dressed. She pops into that one to have a drink.

Dirk Halfspeed Reimagined - Part 2

Let's say Dirk's real name is Dirk Knightley (or some variation of this spelling). Let's say Dirk does not find out what is his last name, only his first name, and let's say his real name is not revealed to the readers either, at least not for the first few episodes. So the opening scene he's floating in space unconscious, a la The Bourne Identity. He comes to, he discovers his first name is Dirk and he discovers he knows nothing else about himself.

He discovers he has lots of oxygen remaining, maybe four hours, so he is not in immediate danger of suffocating - but he's in space, who knows how far he is from anything. He tests his thrusters and plays around with them. He can "swim" in space, but what direction would he go in?

Perhaps he is able to determine by reading the stars that he is "near" the Nexus station. "Near" means six to eight hours away at thruster speed. More than the amount of time for which his oxygen will last. His thruster only has enough power for maybe two hours. Maybe only half an hour.

He flips himself around to face various directions but there is nothing to see in any direction. But wait, one of the stars is getting brighter. Or is it? It seems to be getting bigger. Dirk realizes there is a ship heading right for him. It is heading right towards him, like a speeding locomotive train.

He dives straight "down", relative to the axis of the ship's travel. He hears a huge rumble, then remembers sound doesn't travel in space. The sound is his own heartbeat, his own breathing, his own blood pumping through his veins; his sense of hearing has been heightened by fear. He looks up and sees the ship passing overhead, maybe four to twelve feet above him. A close call. The ship is moving quickly but he recognizes that the ship is decelerating. He concludes that the ship must be enroute to Nexus Station and is decelerating in preparation for docking. What is several hours away for him is merely minutes away for this ship.

Perhaps Dirk attaches himself to the ship (How? It is moving very fast. Wouldn't his arms be ripped off if he tried to "grab" it?) Perhaps he is close enough to be pulled along by its wake (some kind of magnetic wake that his suit responds to). In any case, he gets an unexpected boost of speed that allows him to "swim" to Nexus station before his oxygen runs out.

Dirk Halfspeed Reimagined - Part 1

In the eighties, I used to cowrite an adventure serial called The Tales of Dirk Halfspeed. We wrote it in a slapstick, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy style. I and my writing partner wrote about thirty eight or so episodes.

That's a couple of decades ago and I still periodically have thoughts of writing the next episode, or rebooting the whole serial and start something fresh that is based on those characters. It would be an opportunity to clean up all the inconsistencies we'd written ourselves into, as well as an opportunity for the story itself to mature into something more character oriented and dramatic.

So I've had some ideas and I've jotted down some notes, some thoughts on what a reimagined series could look like.

Dirk comes to consciousness, finding himself floating in space. He is in a space suit with no memory of who he is or how he got into this predicament. He finds a label on his suit and learns that his name is Dirk Halfspeed. Perhaps in a plot twist we learn that this was not really his name but that there is some other significance to this name he finds, but he mistakenly believes it is his name. He adopts it as his identity. This perhaps causes him trouble later, as the name is really a code word or perhaps refers to an organization or something, and is associated with a group of people that are up to no good.

How does Dirk survive? How does he find Sirius? How does he hook up with Seran and Joe, and who are these people in the reimagined series? How does the Negative Time link to this?

Somehow he gets to a space station. This station is like a nexus, because Seran and Joe are both independantly drawn there, and that is where the trio meet each other for the first time (unless I decide that Joe really is Dirk's brother, an idea I tried to work into the original series).

More thoughts and explorations to follow.

Tremendous difficulty

I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. It occurs to me as I write these words that should a wormhole suddenly open up in my vicinity then those words could be carried through to a neighbouring galaxy, be misinterpreted as a grievous insult, and instigate a galactic war. However, I'll take my chances, and should they send in their fleet I remain confident that Chandler will defeat them by simply swallowing them.

That being said, this year seems to be starting up too quickly for me. All the stuff I'm involved with is picking up again and I feel like I just don't have the energy to keep up with it all. Maybe I need some recovery time from the holidays.