Ashe | Meet the Mercyblades
Hi. I’m Daniel Bayn. All the top interviewers want to talk to me about my new novel, Mercyblades, but they’re too shy to ask. So, until they muster up the courage, I’ll be interviewing myself…
Meet Ashe. She’s the founding member of a vigilante trio called the Mercyblades. Centuries from now, humanity has colonized the solar system, disassembling Mercury to build a swarm of bottle worlds around the Sun. When these paradises become prisons, the Mercyblades come to the rescue.
With weaponized metaphors and juvenile pranks.
Ashe is a ship-bodied person. Her cybernetic brain is nestled deep inside Echo, a lithe little high-G ship bristling with weapons. When she wants to interact with people — which is rarely — she appears as a ghostly woman in a white dress.
She’s also an illegal fork with identity issues.
What’s a fork?
When your brain is a computer, your mind is data… and data can be copied. A second instance of a person is called a fork, and making one is very illegal. The future takes personhood extremely seriously: no self-aware programs, no artificial superintelligence, and no fully-functioning forks. Some places don’t look kindly on having children, either.
Ashe’s case is even more fraught, because her parent died committing a terrible crime mere hours after creating her. Ashe struggles with what could possibly have happened, in those few hours, to cause her parent to end so many lives… and if she would’ve done the same.
What’s her (parent’s) backstory?
The original Ashe (her name was Higgs) was born on Mars, which is the solar system’s answer to middle-class suburbs. Its residents aren’t luddites, like those left on Earth, but they’re also not high-minded or mission-driven like the Jovians and Saturnals. The spinning dome cities are Mars are just fine for them, thank you.
Higgs, however, was a born revolutionary. She didn’t trust the system that determines who gets access to what all across the solar system. It’s a “live and let live” form of government that leaves plenty of room for the kinds of bad actors the Mercyblades fight against. Higgs directed her ire more at the network of volunteers who monitor and maintain that system.
Now, those same Arbiters hunt her copy. Ashe was born an outlaw.
Weaponized metaphors and juvenile pranks?
Ashe is my point-of-view character for virtual reality stuff. Her weapon of choice is a blade of white light that shoots off to infinity. She uses it to slice virtual worlds in half, crashing their code and severing their network connections. (Even a Mercyblade without a physical body gets a cool sword, guaranteed.)
In Mercyblades, virtual realities work on dream logic, no modern-day computer interfaces in sight. Every program is represented by some kind of metaphor, like Ashe’s laser sword. Things don’t just happen, there’s always a metaphorical representation.
(See, Megastructures of Mercyblades for more on dreamworlds.)
The juvenile pranks come in when somebody messes with Ashe’s ship, Echo. The opening chapter is all about the puerile revenge she wreaks on somebody who cuts her off in traffic, or the orbital equivalent thereof. She chases them down and laser etches a penis onto their hull. I was inspired by the opening chapter of Snow Crash, wherein the protagonist takes delivering a pizza way too seriously.
What’s her character arc?
Hunted by Arbitration, Ashe is forced to face her identity issues and confront the parts of her personality that make her similar to Higgs. Throughout the novel, she’s set on proving to others that she’s her own person, that she wouldn’t do what Higgs did. Naturally, she ends up in a similar situation, where she can accomplish a personal goal by allowing a bunch of (not exactly innocent) people to die… and she finds another way.
In the sequel I’m planning, she then has to face another copy of Higgs, one that hasn’t had years of experiences as an outlaw and a Mercyblade, one who’s a lot more like the original. Confronting the ways in which they’re alike, and building a bridge to that version of herself, will be the key to resolving this second character arc.
What’s your favorite thing about Ashe?
Her fire. Ashe suffers no fools and I always admire that in people. I also enjoyed writing a virtual character, one who appears in scenes as a kind of hologram. She gets to have a very different experience of the world, one that’s mediated by data, but completely free of physical limitations. Also her sense of humor. That’s three favorite things, but they’re all kind of connected. Whatever! This is my interview!
What inspired Ashe?
That opening scene of Snow Crash, initially, but Ashe is otherwise a kind of character I know all too well. Most of my works include a feminine character who’s had quite enough of the world’s bullscrap and isn’t shy about letting the world know it. From a kung-fu gunslinger to the hoodoo sheriff of New Orleans, this character lives rent free in my heart.
Mercyblades is now available on Amazon Kindle.
