[ Wednesday, June 02, 2004 ]
PARADOX KID
SERIES SYNOPSIS
Book One: Speed of Life
Chapter One: Absolute Beginners
Gabriel discovers that he is not the only one of his kind, and that he is dying of a disease that afflicts only his doppelgangers. Forced by Lady Gabrielle to give up the mysterious “OmniChron,” Father leads her instead into a booby-trap. Gabriel escapes with the device, but is blasted by a double and disappears.
Chapter Two: Sound & Vision
Gabriel finds himself being interrogated for the theft of the Omicron. He’s in one of the parallel Cruxes, where Amelia Earhart is mayor but Lady Gabrielle is making a bid for the job. Video shows him stealing the device, but he argues that the man on
the screen was a double. Scientists who designed the OmniChron — Gabe’s father among them — are ready to activate it and send the time-lost inhabitants of the city back to their homes. Gabe tries to warn Earhart and Father that the OmniChron will only lose them in between time, relegating them to ghostly non-existence. They discover it is embedded in Gabe’s chest, fused with his heart and nervous system — but he argues that this isn’t their OmniChron at all. It’s the one from his Crux, not theirs. Lady Gabrielle attempts to cut it out, but it absorbs the beam and he disappears.
Chapter Three: Golden Years
Gabriel finds himself in Crux again, again an empty city of ghosts. He finds evidence that someone is living in Father’s laboratory. A woman. He chases her across town, finally stopping her when he shows her the crystal in his chest. She’s been alone here for what seems like years, and she’s begun to figure out the technology. She tries to regulate the energies of the device in his chest, using a similar one she discovered here. She shows him the discs of video she’s managed to capture while viewing into various times and realities. She shares her ideas about the pecan tree of time. She seduces him. Final panels: Months after he fluxes away, she thinks about her baby. She will name him Gabriel, and he’ll be born in Crux, ageless in the flux.
Interlude: Seven Years in Tibet
An eye-shaped clasp in the museum of Crux reveals a standalone tale of Gabriel as a child, eternally five years old. He studies under an Ancient One in the mountains of Tibet, where he learns martial arts, Eastern religion, and is befriended by an American surgeon who has come here to study the mystic arts. The monks are betrayed by another of the old teacher’s students, a European baron, but the American stranger spirits Gabriel away during the Communist attack.
Unknown [9:50 AM]
