The Virulence Protocol

Make Fiction Interactive

May 26, 2021

Here’s what you get in every issue of Into the Storymaze: writing insights or a work-in-progress; something creative I’m digging; a highlight from my comics-writing credits; plus a quote that’s got me thinking — both about right now and what’s next.

Twisty Little Passages

For as long as I can remember toying around with computers, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of an “interactive story.” (I spent a long set of days at multiple E3 game shows back in the nineties, trying to convince developers to create “interactive comics.”) The earliest of these were love letters to language from a company called Infocom, who popularized the Zork series: an adventure in a fantastic, funny, frightening underground kingdom presented in 2 color text. Just the words, ma’am.

The “choose your own adventure” style of these games presented rich descriptions and dialogue, and as the player you got to type in words or half-formed sentences to influence what comes next. Choices matter, as they say, and pulling out the breadstick vs. the lamp could make all the difference between going hungry or being eaten by a grue in the darkness. Some still carry the torch for these adventures, and giving, smart people like Chris Klimas have created tools like Twine that allow for creating these types of games by cro-magnon coder wannabes like me. Here’s one of mine. (I know we’re all weary of viruses, my only excuse is the bones of this was written pre-pandemic…)

As Captain of the interstellar CSS Jonas Salk, your mission has always been clear and corporate: pirate the living specimens of alien worlds, seeking new biologies that can be exploited for medicine and profit. Something about that must not have sat right with the universe. Because what your crew found last expedition is not a cure, but a curse. A virus now eats away at all of you, raising tensions and terror inside the ever more claustrophobic spacecraft. With no established protocol for this level of infection, it's up to you to decide whether to contain the virus — or let the malice find its way back to Earth. (Intrigued? Try your luck!)

This is how part of it looks as a “game map” inside Twine. (Talk about a Storymaze!) Each box is something like a scene, and if you’ve “played” the story a bit you get a (teeny-tiny) sense from this of how certain moments loop back or branch off.

This spooky spaceship was originally on the launchpad as a comic, written for an anthology the publisher never moved forward with. (Does that still make count as a publisher?) Here’s an excerpt from that script. I was able to maintain much of the dialogue and incidents, but had to expand the descriptions considerably, and then work in the interactivity and consequences. It’s a great reminder that you can always find ways to recreate your creations.

DEEP SPACE
The CSS (Commercial Space Ship) JONAS SALK drives between the stars. A battered workhorse, the Salk in some ways resembles one of those old, metal hypodermic needles, remade into a retro-futuristic spaceship. From a distance, we can see there's a FEMALE ASTRONAUT, STEWART, floating alongside the ship, attached to it by what appears to be a long tether line.
CAPTION: Commercial Space Ship Jonas Salk.
CAPTION: Astrobiology Pharmaceutical Exploit License 27972.
RITTER: Damn it, Stewart — RESPOND!
KENNEDY: She can’t answer you now, Captain Ritter.
CLOSE ON STEWART (theres a nametag on her spacesuit). In her ordinary state, she’s a tough looking blonde, like a younger Jane Lynch. But right now it’s two things about her that immediately jump out in grisly detail: 1) her spacesuit mask is open and she's a form of zombie; and 2) the "tether" that connects her back to the ship is really a length of entrails that she's hungrily, sloppily munching on.
There's a unique visual quality to her zombie-ism: a spiderweb pattern of discolored veins below the skin, edged with a rise of pimply-bumps. (We’ll see this as an identifying element throughout the story, so it should “transmit” itself to the reader easily.)
KENNEDY: She’s busy eating.
CLOSE ANGLE ON THE SHIP’S AIRLOCK.
The entrails lead back to the ship, and into BILLINGS, a dumpy dead crewman, a Zach Galifianakis type. He’s painfully wedged in the half closed outer airlock door. Billings is missing his helmet, his spacesuit is badly torn open in many places, and there are ragged bites taken out of his exposed arm and face. It's clear he died...badly.
Looking past BILLINGS we can see a small window on the inner airlock door. Looking out at Billings' carnage are RITTER, the captain, a weary, troubled Scott Glenn type. Crowded next to him is KENNEDY, the ship's doctor, like a young Glen Close, but with longer black hair.
Both are pale and haunted. Both have traces of spiderweb veins and pimples smearing part of their face: the early stage of the same zombie-ism that took Stewart.
KENNEDY: Stewart proves my point. I'm a patch and stitch guy at best.
INTERIOR SHIP CORRIDOR. Kennedy is turning to RITTER, Kennedy using the moment to try and sell her plan. We can see they wear a form of simple uniform, but it’s like a mall cop: cheap and functional. RITTER has an extra set of gold epaulets on his shoulders.
Ritter is barely paying attention, turning to DIETRICK, the engineer. A rotund woman, like the actress Kathy Bates. She's in the cramped hall behind the doc and captain; she wears a coverall version of the ship’s uniform, and also has the marks of encroaching zombie-ism. Dietrick squats down by an open electrical access panel along the wall, preparing to snip a set of wires.
KENNEDY: We need to get back to Earth. They've got the medical expertise to get us clear from this!
RITTER: Blow it, Dietrick,
CLOSE UP ON Dietrick as she snips the wires.
DIETRICK: See you soon, Billings...
SFX: SNRIIKK
The airlock door and what's left of Billings explode away from the ship. Ritter and Kennedy watch from inside the small window. RITTER looks especially troubled.
RITTER: Here’s what worries me, Dr. Kennedy. If back home can’t fix us...
EXTERIOR SPACE, MED. LONG SHOT on the ship. The now free-floating and ravenous Stewart is pulling/chewing her way down the entrails to close in on the tasty Billings.
RITTER: ...then we're the ones that send the human race straight to hell.

Treasure Seekers

Lot of unintentional retro going on this time out. Must be too much time in my youth sniffing model glue. Completely by chance, of course, a by-product of good times building plastic model kits, like Star Trek’s Enterprise and Klingon war bird. And especially the wicked wonders of Aurora movie monsters — which I highly recommend is worth going down an interwebs rabbit hole.

My paint jobs never matched my mind’s eye (or the box art) — but I kept buying and trying. In today’s news and as semi-related as my toulene-melted neurons can make happen…

While many of these treasures are movies or books or games, there’s delights, of a kind, to be found in short vids, too. Even off-beat throwbacks like this one. It’s not the next-level moral, medical, societal, madness propositioned in this 60s PSA that I’m taken by — although you can and should appreciate the methodical inevitability of its storytelling.

What I’m especially grooving on, I suppose, it its comic style slide art — very Jack Davis. Maybe it is Jack Davis? (And I do feel nostalgic for that throwback “boing” as each slide advances… a remnant of an earlier age of presentations.)

The Comics Labyrinth

As noted in this episode’s opening word salvo, for a long time I preached the possibility of “interactive comics.” No one — including myself — actually knew what this would entail, but it always got heads nodding. “Yeah, yeah, that would be cool…” Even with today’s more digital comics, it’s still not a fully formed thing. Probably if it ever did achieve escape velocity in the proper fashion, it would have to be renamed as something new and different.

But way back when, I did have a chance to pioneer some of the earliest digi-comics, as part of Marvel’s fledging online efforts. These “cybercomics” (ah, the frontier days when putting “cyber” out front made all the difference!) were a combo of light animation, but combined with limited interactive hotspots. Drag two characters together to have them cute meet; click on the radio to play a police report. Writing these was a combo of plot and script *and* what would happen with those points of interactivity.

The audience was small, but I was totally into creating as many of these as they’d let me. They were brought to life by a talented programmer in a now defunct piece of software called Macromedia Director, which no longer runs on any modern OS, so we’re deprived (or spared) the click-click-click. Fortunately, before I upgraded, I was able to capture all of them as mini-movies, with me driving the animation and action triggers.

Not quite the same “lean into the screen” as the original intent, but you’ll get a taste. Speaking of taste… if you’re picking up on the coppery notes of blood on your palate, it’s ‘cause this one was a promo for the first Blade film.

Web of Intrigue

“I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.” — Lewis H. Lapham

Amazing Times

How’d we end up here together? Maybe a detour off the dark web! But I’m hoping it’s because you subscribed to this share-out of projects I’m working on plus things that have me jazzed. I’m D.G. Chichester. Which sounds very pretentious, and tweed jacket and pipe — so feel free to just call me “Dan”, and have a go at the last name as Chai (like the tea) Chester (just like it looks). I earned my word-cred writing comic book titles like Daredevil, Terror Inc., Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, along with all manner of digital widgets and websites in the world wide web of advertising. I keep my storytelling cred by trying new things — this is one of ‘em. I like weird and sometimes creepy tales, so if things here bend that way — now you know why!

Folks seem to like the comic book adventures I’ve written, so if you haven’t checked one out — please do. Many are now available in fab collected editions.

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