Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Comments: Strong (3/?)

Let me start with a few general musings about this part.

First, Sunnydale is a place where the death rate Yet no one seemed to notice this horrific fact at all. Scores of people were killed in separate incidents, and TV, radio and national newspapers didn't seem to have a clue that anything the least bit unusual had taken place. And now that a hundred murder victims have been found on the rim of the crater of the sunken Sunnydale, Marcus, the man who examines the corpses, tells Lois that In other words, in your story there is a cover-up conspiracy of gigantic proportions, apparently instigated by the government and/or other authorities and important players in society, including the media. And I have to ask myself, why? Why would the government and media, whose job it is to inform the American people about the country they inhabit, instead work their little behinds off to keep the enormous and unfolding tragedy of Sunnydale a complete and total secret from the public?

One reason why I could never believe the claim by UFOlogists, that the American government covered up the repeated visits to the Earth by space aliens, was that I couldn't understand what the American government could possibly stand to gain from keeping such a thing a secret. Also, assuming the aliens were here at all, I couldn't see how the government could ever make them disappear simply by denying their existence. If these alien beings had travelled across light-years to come and visit us here on Earth, surely their technology was advanced enough to withstand whatever weapons the American government might aim at them? And if, by some lucky chance, the government managed to, say, shoot down and defeat one such alien spacecraft, how could they possibly just spirit away the tens of thousands of other UFOs that so many people claim to have seen? Did the government just make all these aliens disappear by denying their existence?

No, if the aliens themselves wanted to keep their presence on the Earth a secret from the earthlings, surely they wouldn't keep showing themselves to so many people in so many countries for so many years? If, on the other hand, they wanted to reveal their existence to humanity, surely no government on the Earth would be able to prevent them from doing so - by landing their spacecraft in the middle of Manhattan, for example?

So I concluded long ago that there is no government conspiracy to cover up the visits to the Earth by space aliens. (And therefore the aliens either aren't here, or else they are too sophisticated for us to detect them.) But in your story, Shayne, there is certainly a huge government conspiracy to cover up the extremely sinister goings-on in and around Sunnydale. Okay, so why would the government want to cover up such a thing? And how could they possibly accomplish it?

I suppose the government wanted to hush the whole thing up because... they didn't want to create a panic? All right, I can buy that, if there had been just one horrible incident taking place in Sunnydale. But unspeakable things seem to happen here all the time. Come on... surely no American administration would be content to just cover up and cover up and cover up the never-ending tragedies of Sunnydale? Surely they would want to stop those tragedies from happening? Surely the government wouldn't just act like a bunch of storks, not only burying their own heads in the sand, but digging three hundred million other holes in the sand to shove the heads of the entire American population into these pits of ignorance?

It's very hard to understand why the American government would want to do such a thing. The second question is, assuming they wanted to do it at all, how could they accomplish it? How could they carry out such a massive, massive, massive cover-up?

The only answer I can think of is, well, foul play of the supernatural kind. Maybe the vampires (or their boss? Old Nick himself?) have somehow cast a spell on the American authorites? Maybe they have frightened these worldly guardians of America into an unholy panic of inaction and cover-ups, or maybe they've just made them blind and deaf to anything that happens in Sunnydale? And maybe the vampires have planted their own moles in the government? Maybe the government people who travel around to cover everything up are really vampires themselves?

There was another thing in this part that really had me thinking. Those murder victims that were examined by the coroner here seemed to be taken straight out of the Middle Ages. They wore helmets, mail shirts and armoured gloves, and they were armed with swords, maces and crossbows. They all wore a special sort of undergarment, the Vestis Angelica, which was worn during the Middle Ages by people who felt that their death was imminent, and this garment would supposedly give them the benefit of a monk's prayers.

In other words, these people were dressed like people from the Middle Ages, they were armed like people from the Middle Ages, and, not least important, they were apparently thinking just like people from the Middle Ages. And you know, if something looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are that it is a duck. So chances are, in other words, that these people were really from a time before the Enlightenment.

And therefore it would seem as if people from the Middle Ages have somehow "broken through the portals of time" and arrived in "our" time period (or at least the period of Buffy and Lois and Clark). These medieval fellas came here fully armed and prepared for war. Because they all realized their end might be nigh, each of them wore a Vestis Angelica. They ran into vampires, and all of them - or at least all of those who are now in the morgue - were killed.

The Middle Ages was a fascinating time. Superstitions of all kinds ran rampant, the world seemed to be swarming with demons and devils, and people prayed to the saints and the angels to save them from evil - but sometimes, when the saints and angels were slow to deliver, some people allied themsleves with the demons and devils instead.

I am fundamentally a skeptic. I believe that reality exists independently of us humans. I believe in a world of atoms, of quarks, of photons, of fundamental forces of physics, which creates a reality that has given birth to us, but which hasn't put us at the center of all things. But we put ourselves at the center of the only reality we can truly imagine, our own world; we think of the world as made for us; and we give the forces of the world around us more or less human faces.

I believe there is only one true reality. But I also believe it is extremely hard, laborious and in the end perhaps impossible for us to fully understand this stark reality of a cosmos of physical forces. We humans, on the other hand, create our own realities, built from what we have sensed and experienced with our own imperfect senses, and from what our family, friends and other important people have told us, because of what their family, friends and other important people have told them. And because we have been seen it on TV.

I think that we live inside our own "reality bubble", which determines how we see the world around us. Some peoples in Africa and South America name and use only three colors in their language and their native art, black, white and red. If your language offers you only these three colors, is it even possible for you to think to yourself that the sky is very blue today and the grass is very green? Then again, according to physics "blue" and "green" are just imprecise names for two fuzzily determined spans of electromagnetic waves of certain wavelengths. Do we know what blue and green really is?

The point I'm trying to make is that we learn to think of reality in a certain way, and then it is very, very hard, sometimes impossible, to unlearn it. A more important point I'm trying to make here is that - you know, those medieval people? They came here, encased in their own reality bubble. Inside that reality bubble there are innumerable beasts and demons and devils and angels and saints. There are vampires there. And when the people of the Middle Ages came here, their own belief in their own reality was so strong that - well, they brought their own mental paraphernalia with them. And they believed in all that stuff so strongly that it became "real". Not "real" in the sense that it truly became a part of the physical reality. But "real" in the sense that it invaded other people's reality bubbles and became real to them. And "real" in the sense that these mental monsters could really kill. Personally I believe that the beliefs of some people literally kill other people.

In the end your story can't be explained, Shayne. It can't be "translated" into a real scenario. In the end, those medieval people came here, bringing their belief in vampires with them. Personally, I will need some very, very hard evidence before I believe in either time travel or undead people. But it is fun to suspend one's own disbelief for a while and play around with concepts that can only exist in other reality bubbles, or in the realm of magical make-belief.

Sorry about my babbling, Shayne. Maybe I will post a better comment on this part later (but then again, maybe not). Anyway, this was a great part again, as usual and as always!

Ann