Rules in a Fictional Universe

Star Trek: Into Darkness has been out for a couple weeks now. My wife and I had a chance to see it, and we enjoyed it.



Of course, there was a lot of speculation as to the way this second movie in the rebooted "Abramsverse" franchise would align to original Wrath of Khan; I have to say that the previews and photos released of the movie were a total red herring as to what to expect. In a way it was true to form from the original second movie; I remember reading that it was leaked to the public that Spock was to die in that film, and fans were whipped into a frenzy. Remember how Wrath of Khan opened? A simulated battle in which Spock, then captain of the Enterprise, "died."

Supposedly this was added to show fans, "Ha ha! You thought Spock was going to die and we totally tricked you! This was the scene that was referred to in the leak!" This also explained the reference to a line from Kirk after the simulation asking Spock, "Aren't you dead?"

Total misdirection. Into Darkness played that hand very well.


We enjoyed the movie, but I started musing aloud to my wife some things that didn't quite make sense to me. She sort of nods and ignores me, since I'm thinking about sane elements in a fictional universe, but these are the sort of things that kind of irk me in a universe that has established rules.

(Warning, some things that follow would be spoilers. If you cared, though, you've already seen the movie by now...so...warning, otherwise, don't complain.)

Yes, this is fiction. Science fiction. Where some plot holes are waved off with techno-jargon the way Harry Potter films can be explained through adequate explanation of magic if necessary.

But in an established universe, there are rules to follow. Rules that if broken, for a fan, this means the suspension of disbelief necessary to follow the story can break. Science fiction fans are notorious sticklers for rules, and this in turn leads to the roadblocks that turn into online bickering over details in the movies that risk alienating a loyal fanbase.

Let's draw a parallel. Man of Steel, yet another reboot of the Superman franchise, will no doubt create a new spin on Superman's origin. It will probably have the basic elements that have been rehashed with every movie and comic...planet Krypton, explosion, baby in space, raised in the middle of ideal America, the Kents.

The thing is that Superman has been around for a long time. A really long time. He premiered in 1938, back when comics tended to have some really absurd things incorporated into the storylines. Basically whenever the writers need a new ability, they sort of just gave it to him. Things that "worked" became permanent. Things that didn't, they conveniently forgot about.

For instance, in the early days superman didn't fly. He could jump really far (ever give thought to the whole, "leap tall buildings in a single bound" thing describing Superman?) He had other abilities, like Super Ventriloquism and Super Telepathy. He even had Super Muscle Control that he used to pretend he was dead by stilling his heart and reshape his face and body so he could imitate an alien.

Most of these abilities faded away, lost to comic history. Sometimes they reappeared in other forms (like the Super Kiss that gave Lois Lane amnesia in the movies, or his ability to throw his Super Saran Wrap "S" at his enemies when fighting other Kryptonians in the second movie.)

Adding these abilities detracted from the character; they were convenient ways to wrap up a story without having to actually deal with the conflict (Super Deus ex Machina, I suppose.) The DC comics universe has a roster of characters that are, relatively speaking, gods, with Superman being the pinnacle example. He is invulnerable. He lifts mountains. He has an aura that helps protect things near his skin (the example given is his suit's resistance to damage). He flies. He can fly into space, and since his cells are charged by our yellow sun, he can fly into the sun. Some comics have depicted him as hardly aging, or even being in the center of our sun. He's as fast as the Flash. He shoots heat beams from his eyes, and freezes things with his breath.

Stories require that the hero must overcome adversity. There must be a challenge; a possibility that he (or she) will lose. How can you make an audience worry about the protagonist's life when your protagonist can withstand a nuclear bomb?

Oh, we'll throw in an Achilles heel...Kryptonite. Exposure to this radiation from his homeworld is a poison to this otherwise invulnerable race of god-aliens. But even this was eventually used as a plot point, where depending on what color of the rainbow the Kryptonite it would affect Superman in a different way.

Over time it got really ridiculous, the variations of rule bending that was applied to Superman just so they could have some kind of conflict that would challenge him. That's part of the reason DC decided to reboot their universe, resetting Superman (and many other storylines) with the Crisis. Superman now had more sane, consistent rules applied to his powers and abilities, with everything more absurd being wiped away from the timeline (they essentially pulled a reboot before the term "reboot" became popular in Hollywood.)

So even in a comic universe, establishing rules is important. As a fictional universe grows, new rules...and sometimes stupid ones...are established, and sometimes something has to be done to wipe them out with an in-universe explanation. A reboot, if you will.

Fictional universes are usually based on our own "real" universe, with some elements altered or twisted for dramatic purposes. In superhero universes, we accept that most people are like ourselves; average people going about their business each day, but there's an exceptional person that lives by a slightly different set of rules. Once we know those rules, we settle in to enjoy the story presented.

Star Trek doesn't have the long-running history of Superman, but it does have a longer-than-average history, given that it premiered in 1966. As the storylines progressed, elements that were introduced for practical reasons were given in-universe explanations (for example, shuttles and transporters were invented because they were cheaper than the effects needed to land a starship on a planet in the early episodes, but in-universe they became part of how the future had evolved, and a starship was just too physically large to land.)

Later some rules were altered. The Intrepid class starship (Voyager) is able to land on a planet; it's energy intensive, it's rarely done, but that ship does have landing struts and a procedure that allows it to do so, thanks to the "structural integrity field" that keeps the ship from buckling and flying apart from the stresses of flying through an atmosphere.

The structural integrity field, much like the inertial dampeners, was invented for practical reasons; there's a popular story that when the Enterprise-D was being designed, someone in the art department superimposed the design over the parking lot and realized that something that size would never be able to withstand the forces placed on something that big when moving through space. Inertial dampeners were created because when you have something moving fast in space, even "tiny" changes in velocity would result in large changes in the forces placed on the inhabitants of the ship...in other words, people would be turned into pudding on the walls whenever they tried to turn the ship at a rate that wasn't glacial.

Why were people thrown around when in a battle or during sudden maneuvers? Because there was a slight delay between the change in motion and the computer compensating with the inertial dampeners, of course. Dramatic tension melding with technobabble!

And these rules were established and refined over time. The fact the story producers would address these kinds of technicalities drew geeks with a passion for technology and some way to embrace pedantism. These people will question the effects of relativity on people traveling at warp speed, and how warp speed actually translates to factors of the speed of light. They can, and do, call out producers for getting technical aspects wrong on the ship; remember, these fictional vehicles have had their designs refined to the point where there are cutaway models and posters available of the various Enterprise incarnations showing where things are located on each deck. There have been people who wrote in to ask why rooms had certain markings, knowing that the particular facility was located on <insert correct deck>, and all the producers could do was admit they screwed up.

Yes, the fans in some cases know more about the layout of the fictional ship than the people making the series.

Then came Abrams. Abrams created a new universe, one where he's said that this Star Trek could be the kind of Star Trek he would have enjoyed as a kid (he couldn't "get into" the original Star Trek series and consequently hadn't followed much of the original storylines.) He made it more accessible. He also had the benefit of more advanced technology, so their aliens didn't have to consist of painted paper plates stapled to the actors' faces and spaceships that looked like dangling hubcaps and hot-glued refuse attached to fishing line.

Abrams has created a universe wherein he focuses on the characters rather well. Dramatic tension. He's rewriting and exploring the relationships of these established characters, and doing so rather well. But I think he's also forging new rules within the Star Trek universe, and that creates an odd sense of confusion, or unease. Unless these things are addressed at some point, there will continue to be a sense that something isn't quite right in the Abramsverse.

Does warp speed work differently there? As depicted, it's almost like warp is a corridor through which a ship travels. In the movie, the Enterprise was attacked, and it was suddenly jerked to the size as if it were a skidding car, and "broke" through the corridor to "real space."

In the old series, something like that would have, at a minimum, turned everyone in the ship into biological wall decorations.

For that matter, how is it possible they were fired upon while at warp? Phasers are a light-based weapon, essentially a modified laser. The only thing that could blow up while at warp would be a torpedo, as it could have a small warp-capable casing for short traveling short distances. Are these ships also equipped with some kind of mini-railgun cannon? Or is warp speed using some kind of bubble of non-warp space that would allow for non-relativistic speed weapons use? (The movie would hint not, since they thought they were safe at warp speed right up until they weren't.)

The use of shields are also slightly different. Originally shields were like a second skin, providing an invisible armor that enveloped the ship, and once they had taken an adequate pounding their failure meant the hull was exposed to damage. Over time they seem to go through a few modifications, such as overlapping generators that could be selectively powered (rear shields fail while forward sections were protected) and the use of particular frequencies as a plot point to allow properly tuned weapons to easily breach shields (rotate frequencies to stop the Borg weapon!) The Abramsverse seems to make it abundantly clear that shields don't stop damage so much as they help reduce damage, since the hull was taking a beating throughout the fights and no one seemed a bit surprised as the shields just gradually reduced in power.

Even the size of the ship is called into question; this was a huge sticking point on the Internet when the first rebooted Enterprise was unveiled. People analyzed the ship from graphics, comparing deck sizes to the original ships and using windows and shuttle bay doors as anchor points when figuring out how large it really is and what this would mean for the series. I think it's telling something when at this point, a few years after release, there still aren't "official" technical drawings for this ship.

(If you think I'm just being strange in speculating on this, Google "Enterprise size comparison" to see what work other people have done when sleuthing the stated ship size versus the visual comparisons in the movies. The "original" ship size was over 300 meters, less than 400 meters, and the size of the Abramsverse Enterprise is over 700 meters...which is kind of freaking huge, given that it has an ability to casually land on planets. Someone out there will no doubt eventually do the math to figure out what kind of stresses this would place on a vessel of that kind of mass, even with structural integrity fields and other technobabble to compensate.)

And there still has to be some explanation given as to how the new transwarp transporters, pioneered in the first film and utilized again in this one, work. Or are limited. Because really...if these can be used to beam from one planet to another, why are you using starships? Just send out drones to other places in the galaxy, use beacons to signal back that you can beam there, and beam to that planet. Even Stargate SG-1 had to compensate when gates moved through space over time; somehow this transporter is able to beam to other solar systems and reconstitute living matter on a planet moving relative to your place of origin without worrying about little things like beaming inside the ground (or more likely, into the middle of space.) The implications of this type of technology are really kind of big (much as when people started questioning replicator technology...why not replicate a ship? To which people came up with an answer...more rules of how a universe works, so the universe stays consistent, and can balance dramatic tension with limitations of a magic hand-waving technology.)

I'm hoping that there will be more explanations given as the series continues, especially in relation to how the ship works. In the original series, the Enterprise was more than just a vessel for traveling around the galaxy; it became a character, an extension of the crew. That was part of the reason it was so shocking when the Enterprise was blown up in Star Trek III, paving the way for new ships to continue the name, but it was a shock for the audience when it happened.

Given time, I can get used to many of the changes. Sure, the bridge looks like a futuristic Apple Store. And for some reason engineering looks like it should be brewing batches of beer rather than propelling a ship through space. But I'm really hoping these new rules better defined. I'm kind of worried that in focusing on characters, the technology in the Abramsverse will become simply an extended form of deus ex machina, wherein everything non-character driven is sacrificed in the name of being a convenient plot device that can be thrown away later or explained as if the technology were driven by magic. Star Trek doesn't meld well with that kind of logic. We're talking about fans that debated whether food eaten on the holodeck disappears from your stomach when you leave the simulation (answer: no, since the holodeck uses force fields and replicator technologies, the food you eat is created as any other replicated food while using force fields to create objects you aren't ingesting.)

Magic can be waved away with spells and incantations. Trek fans will want a plausible explanation for how things work...and expect them to keep working within those limitations later.

Are People, At Heart, Horrible?

Science fiction has long been used as a cloak to wrap social commentary so the producers of content can claim that the comments are just...well, part of science fiction. Classic science fiction shows and movies are a snapshot of the times in which they were created.

I was home recently, in part, for my son's birthday. When I'm home I try to set aside time to focus on doing things with my boy, since I'm away in the city so often. I got up one morning and asked him if he'd like to play a video game, and instead he suggested watching a movie. He proudly proclaimed that he found a movie that "you might like, Daddy!," so of course I agreed to see what he unearthed in the Netflix queue.

The movie? Godzilla. Not one of the campy Japanese Godzilla, but the 1998 American Matthew Broderick film. One of the few movies I've seen where Matthew Broderick's performance managed to make me cringe when he delivered lines.

My son is young, so action and effects can carry a bad film well in his opinion. I tried to use it as a teachable moment and brought up the idea that Godzilla was originally a way to express concern about nuclear weapons and experimentation.

"We used nuclear bombs on Japan during World War II," I said. "The radiation causes mutation to people's cells. Cancer. Godzilla was a monster created by nuclear radiation, because that's what people were worried about."

I went on to tell him that if he looked at Spider-Man, originally he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Today's reboots of Spider-Man's origin have him bitten by a genetically altered spider, reflecting our society's concern with experimenting on genes.

This got me thinking about some trends in what comprises popular themes in horror and sci-fi in the past few years.  I know it's not a comprehensive study, and it's purely anecdotal, but this still gives me something to pause and think about.

Example; zombies. My wife and I were discussing Walking Dead and she said that if there were some kind of zombie apocalypse, she'd want to die right away.

"You'd only have to survive a certain period in the beginning...zombies would rot, and in winter they'd freeze, depending on where you were," I said.

"Have you seen what happens to people who survive?," she said. "They aren't running away from zombies."

She had a point. Worse, I read the comic series, so I know what happened there. Walking Dead isn't about zombies. It's about people. And people become very, very horrible in the Walking Dead universe. The acts committed in that series are not so much about survival, but in many cases are an expression of what people will do when they have the opportunity to do the things civilization reins in.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.

I watched a movie this weekend called Hell. It was a German film about a near-future where solar flares damaged our atmosphere, raising temperatures and exposing the planet to more damaging sunlight. Water becomes scarce and people begin fighting for resources. The movie focuses on the efforts of 4 survivors to head to the mountains where water and vegetation are rumored to exist.

Along the way they encounter a group of people who were farmers; I suppose in a way they still are, even after the livestock have died, if you catch my drift. I found the scene where they are seating Marie, whom they plan to marry off to their son, at the dinner table for their...meat stew....cringe-worthy, as they say a prayer thanking God for their bounty, much as some families today. In a future where food becomes scarce I'm not sure this scene is outside the realm of possibility; desperate people have done things like this in the past. This was at a point where there was no regret or hesitation in what they did; it was all justified and had become normal to them, making it all the more horrifying.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.


Star Trek was originally a vision of an optimistic future, where humanity was at peace and people pursued interests to better themselves. Money was no longer a driving force in our lives, as replicators apparently did away with the need for acquiring material wealth. Medicines prolonged lives. Races lived in harmony. The original series had many blatant commentaries on society, from races that were painted black on one sie and white on the other to Kirk kissing Uhura on screen, something sure to upset the more "traditional" minds of the period with strong opinions on mixed-race relationships.

But even in this series set in a backdrop of peace, there were elements of hidden agendas. Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country, focused on the hidden agendas of certain elements in Starfleet, the Romulan and Klingon Empires and the Federation to perpetuate war. It was meant to be a reflection of fear of change, set against a commentary of the cold war between the Russians and the US ending. High-ranking officials in positions of power were maneuvering to continue the war between the two groups rather than move towards peace.

That movie was released in 1991. Today, the US is still at war (though not with our Cold War counterparts) and Congress is lobbied by companies with military interests to continue spending more money on our armed forces than the next 10 major military powers combined.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.

I recognize this is anecdotal. People have a wonderfully developed sense of confirmation bias, and we see patterns in otherwise chaotic systems. Something in these non-patterned anecdotes makes me wonder if we, as a society, don't see a person's potential to always be looking for ways to take advantage of others and justify it through whatever cognitive dissonance necessary to gain the moral high ground. Many of our stories have the "bad guy" able to ruthlessly exploit and manipulate others for their own ends, sometimes with horrifyingly sensible reasoning.

I see it in advertising; we are barraged by messages for beauty products, clothes, weight loss pills and vitamins, herbal remedies, snack foods, fast food promotions and home business ideas. Children are hit with twice as many ads for toys and cartoons (although you might be able to argue that the cartoons are just extended-length advertisements for toys.) Our society is largely consumer based; we judge each other by what toys we possess and what brands we wear.

But what happens when you actually buy these things that you're told to buy?

If you aren't of a wealthier class in society, there is an instant backlash of judgement that you are living beyond your means. It's your fault you're poor.

What stimulates the economy?

The government, along with the businesses that blame you for your economic status, wants you to go out and spend. That message was louder than ever in the post-9/11 economy, ironically around the time people were told they were getting into crap mortgages (that banks knew full well these same people were huge risks to give loans to, but profited from them in the short term) because they should have known better than to get a mortgage they couldn't afford in the first place.

(Keeping in mind that the businesses that controlled the purse strings...taking the risk to make a profit...later blamed them for taking the money they were willing to loan.)

These are groups that work on making a profit to the detriment of society in the long run.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.

I previously posted that there's a long tail of poverty, and the wealth gap is growing. The middle class is slowly disappearing into the tail under the poverty line, while the top 1% continues to gain more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetimes. There won't be enough people to keep spending enough money to keep the economy sustainable.

I also noticed a new trend emerging as policy makers talk of "job makers;" usually these job makers speak up in fighting labor reforms or proposals to increase minimum wage. I also heard the term thrown around quite a bit with healthcare reform, in that new "Obamacare" regulations were too expensive for businesses to afford for their employees.

It struck me as I read articles about minimum wage workers...people working in fast food, or Wal-Mart, or other service industries that serve to skew jobless figures...that these people are often living under the poverty line. The usual image portrayed of the poor are people that sit around reaping free money from the government while watching TV and taking free rides in ambulances because...really, who wouldn't want to spend hours in the hospital in their copious free time?

What happens to the working poor when they have health issues? Taxpayers have to make up the difference.

What happens when the working poor can't afford to feed their kids? Taxpayers make up the difference.

There's a stunning number of working poor, and I fear that number will continue to climb as the economy pushes the middle class farther down in the wealth gap. But it becomes a bit darker when you see that the classic "job creator" lobbying Congress relies on our socialist assistance nets to subsidize their workforce while maximizing profits. They actively lobby to keep regulations and reforms from giving their workers a better standard of living that could help get them off taxpayer funded assistance.

For a certain class of people, Gordon Gekko said it best..."Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works." The problem is that this only seems to work for a narrow class of people.

People can justify just about any behaviors, despite being harmful to others.

Moments of Clarity Relating to Skill

I am rapidly approaching my first year with Stack Exchange. I know this because the management company that collects my rent sent me notice that my lease can be renewed for another year, and I signed when I first came to the city to start my new job.

I have been trying to look back and get a feel for what progress, if any, I've made. There are always things that could use improvement, and I think that the knowledge of just how much I don't know is part of what feeds my feeling of inadequacy. I try to keep perspective by reminding myself of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Unfortunately that's not always effective.


It's especially hard when I work with a number of young, intelligent, highly competent people. They are a reminder that had I taken a different path, instead of deciding to go into the IT department in a public school system, I may have more marketable skills and experience.

I do have a tendency, surrounded with a pool of talented younger people, to focus on the skills I am lacking in and they excel in. And that is why, upon reflection of the past nearly-year, I have at least two moments of clarity that struck me square in the melon.

First, one of the more routine tasks I've been performing involves ownership of the tape backup rotation. We have logs of every hit our balancers get, and these logs get pretty large pretty fast. Despite having an 8-tape LTO-4 jukebox, we're hitting low-tape alarms in the course of about a week or so. Usually I'm the person that heads to the data center, about 25 minutes from the office, to perform a tape swap.

We recently hosted a summit wherein remote community, system administrators, and developers came to our office. Several of the technical people spent their first days playing in the datacenter, and one day coincided with the need to swap tapes. "Hey, while you guys are there, could you...?"

They needed a cable brought out to them from the office, and the sysadmin who mentored me on the backup system volunteered to take it out to them. When he came back, he said that they were having...issues...with swapping out the tapes.

These are people I hold in high regard. Very high regard. They're very good at what they do, and tape backups are not what they normally handle as an everyday task. So having issues with figuring out how to work the tape system is not something to hold against them. But he had no idea how much pride that gave me to know that there is something I'm able to do as a routine task that people I look up to with envy could not.

I have a skill that is useful and fills a niche to them. He had no idea how much this made my day.

Then there was a more recent example of skill development.

We have several hires coming in. I'm working on getting equipment and accounts set up. I was setting up a phone (Polycom VOIP phone) for one of the new hires.

I brought it into the build room and thought I'd get the configuration done in Asterisk (The sysadmin that owns the phone management has it mostly simplified through macros in the config files) and test the phone.

I ran through the checklists. Updated phone numbers and extensions in documentation. Started the phone...no configuration.

I double checked the phone's MAC setting on the server. Matched.

I checked that the FTP server was running on the server. Running.

Asterisk was running after the service reload for changed configurations.

I then went into the phone and reset it to factory defaults, thinking something was "stuck." It reset to defaults...and wouldn't pull the new settings.

Next I went on the switch. It saw the phone's MAC in the address table.

I looked at the port it was plugged into; that port, for some reason, was missing the phone VLAN. A couple of lines added and running config saved, the phone pulled its configuration without a hitch.

I was finally able to close the loop on a troubleshooting issue that before coming here I wouldn't have been able to do; I would have been stymied at the Cisco switch. I simply haven't been buried in the Cisco infrastructure enough to know the necessary configuration and diagnostic steps to take without the fear of screwing something up or knocking the office's Internet access offline.

That ability to close that loop...troubleshoot from start to finish something that a few months ago I wouldn't have been able to do...that's progress. And it was a moment of clarity for me.

I am improving.

I now can tell if a remote office has a computer or phone plugged into the network by looking for the MAC in the address tables of a switch across the country or on the other side of the ocean. I was mapping out what ports are active in a remote office, as well as checking what ports aren't configured for any devices. I'm confident doing this now, something I wouldn't have done before.

I'm always afraid that I'm not improving enough, or not showing skill enough to be worthy of working at a startup with so many great people. My goal now is to keep improving, while accepting that improvements don't come in sudden waves so much as a series of smaller steps that build up over time.

My first year is coming up. With it I believe there will be a review of my progress; I am hoping my peers have noticed improvements over time, and I look forward to guidance of what really needs tuning. But if they ask if there's something I feel I am proud of, I can say that I can swap tapes at the datacenter and I configured a phone without resorting to bothering other people for help.

Look for moments of clarity in your work life. Reflect on what you have done, and how you've improved. Perhaps you're like me and you get caught up in the frustration of things you can't do right or things you screw up, and forget the things that you are doing right and the skills you are learning.  If you really reach a point where you go weeks at a time without any such moments of positive clarity it may be time to reach for a change.